LIFE AFTER SCANDAL
Hampstead
Theatre, London NW3
Opened 25 September, 2007
***
It is either brave or foolhardy of Hampstead's artistic director
Anthony Clark to programme Robin Soans' new verbatim play barely three
months after Dennis Kelly's Taking
Care Of Baby at the same address mimicked the verbatim form in
order to indict our culture which both produces and consumes "reality"
media material so voraciously. Soans' piece exhibits some of the traits
exposed by Kelly. One becomes conscious of the interviewer, unseen and
unheard on stage but evidently pushing a particular agenda;
paradoxically, this is most palpable in a sequence in which several
interviewees' remarks are interedited as a diatribe against celebrity
culture.
There also seems to be some deliberate moral positioning of the
portrayals of those involved, whether by Soans, director Clark or the
actors. Of the numerous interviewees who experienced political,
financial, sexual and/or criminal scandals, we are left in little doubt
that we are intended to view former government minister and convicted
perjurer Jonathan Aitken, as played by Philip Bretherton, as too pious
to be true, or Charles and Diana Ingram (the former convicted of
deception after winning the top prize on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?) as
pompous and unrepentant. Conversely, Tim Preece's Lord Montagu
(imprisoned in 1954 for consensual homosexual sex) comes over as a
paragon of agonised conscientiousness, and Michael Mears and Caroline
Quentin as former "cash for questions" MP Neil Hamilton and his wife
Christine are as disarming as their real-life originals in embracing
their new role as "a pair of Butlin's Redcoats to the nation". Most
tellingly, only the final 15-20 minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour play
are actually about what the title claims: life after scandal. The main focus
is on the accounts of the scandals themselves and the protagonists'
comeuppances, judicial or otherwise.
Soans seems aware that there is less meat to this subject than his
previous verbatim plays such as The
Arab-Israeli Cookbook and Talking
To Terrorists. He tries to counter this by adding some awkward
musical extracts, and by including remarks from interviewees and some
(possibly composite) "vox pop" characters about celebrity culture in
general. But however real an issue this might be, it cannot avoid
becoming the kind of artefact whereby such culture exalts itself rather
than, as is intended, accusing.
[Footnote: Later that evening I got an e-mail from Christine
Hamilton asking me what I'd thought; I gave a distilled version of the
above, to which she replied that she had principally been outraged by
an item of costume: "Neil's never worn a ready-made bow tie in his life!"]
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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