Playwright Anders Lustgarten has lately
been presenting his incandescent political radicalism through
intriguing allegorical filters. This time last year, his
The Seven Acts Of Mercy for the RSC
set contemporary social depredations against the work of Caravaggio;
now
The Secret Theatre
considers the surveillance state through its effective inventor in
England, Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster to Elizabeth I in the 1570s
and ’80s.
The parallels between today’s war on (principally Islamic) terror and
the Elizabethan war on (largely Spanish) Catholicism aren’t exactly
opaque; nor are the realities behind the rhetoric, the “false flag”
operations, the nurturing of threats in order to create insecurity as a
pretext for increased “security” and the like. Lustgarten even goes
all-out for chucklesome topicality now and again with amusing but heavy
lines such as “If we tax [the bankers] they will leave” and, so help
me, a summer/tennis gag, which can feel as if he’s proving to himself
how we lap up the simple stuff. Elsewhere, though, individual lines
burn with the intensity of the social rage that fires him as a writer,
and the clarity of the main analogy is a strength rather than a
weakness.
Matthew Dunster’s direction is in keen sympathy with both the thematic
and dramatic drives of the play. Aidan McArdle’s initially unflappable
Walsingham, later increasingly prey to both illness and what Harold
Macmillan called “events, dear boy, events”, and Tara Fitzgerald,
unrecognisable beneath white lead and ginger fright-wig as a petty,
arrogant, vindictive and occasionally plain vulgar Elizabeth, duel in
the Wanamaker’s trademark period-faithful candlelight. Indeed, Dunster
and lighting designer Malcolm Rippeth make full use of this aspect to
drive home the most common metaphor for espionage: as we watch all
these candles being repeatedly extinguished and relit, it is borne
directly in on us how much of this business takes place in the shadows,
how much we are kept in the dark. And by the final phase, with its talk
of Walsingham having created “an apparatus of security which will never
be dismantled”, we are sharply aware not just of how little has changed
but of how long it has been maintained. As cynical bumper-stickers say,
“Support your local police state”.
Written for the Financial
Times.