Sincerity, we are told, is the great
thing: once you can fake that, you’ve got it made. And fakery has
been much on our minds this January, or at least something not entirely
unrelated to it. As most reviews mention in one form or another,
the opening of
Complicit at
The Old Vic was postponed for over a week, and throughout previews and
even after it had opened, actor Richard Dreyfuss was visibly wearing an
earpiece through which he was rumoured to be receiving frequent prompts.
Speechifying
This is another instance in which the blogosphere proves its
worth. Bloggers such as the West End Whingers, not being
constrained by press-night embargoes, can report on earlier
performances and give us a fuller picture of what’s been going
on. (Supposedly professional reviewers such as Tim Walker, on the
other hand,
are so
constrained, and are simply fouling their own nest and ours by flouting
such embargoes.) Mind you, this story made the news pages as
well. Reports emerged of Dreyfuss prowling around the stage as if
lost, repeating lines several times until the next one came out
(perhaps via the radio prompt). Now, I didn’t see the production
until the Saturday matinée after its rescheduled opening, but I
can’t help wondering whether the folk behind those accounts simply
aren’t all that familiar with Dreyfuss’s acting style. I saw him
doing nothing he hadn’t been doing since, say, the movie of
The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz in
1974. Nevertheless, it’s possible that he had been that unsure of
his lines; the earpiece had to be there for a reason. (One
panellist on BBC’s
Newsnight Review blithely
compared it to the presence of a prompter in the wings; the difference,
of course, is that a prompter is there
in case, whereas such an earpiece –
like the autocue used by Bruce Myers in his performances of
The Grand Inquisitor in 2006 – can
only be there
because.)
I disagree, however, with those who dismiss Joe Sutton’s play
entirely. It had clearly been subjected to major revision: the
version I saw ran for 25 minutes less than the programme claimed, and
two entire characters in the cast list, the Interrogators, did not
appear at all. But the play I saw was not a dreadful piece of
work. What it was, is a poor choice for The Old Vic or for
anywhere in Britain. We tend to watch it in terms of Dreyfuss’s
protagonist and what he thinks and feels, whereas this is
secondary. What one critic described as the “passable
speechifying” of the play is its real point. It's America,
stoopid. This isn't a conflict, as it may seem to be, between the
protagonist’s liberalism and his neoconservatism. It's about the
more basic subversion of core American values... more, of American
identity. This becomes much clearer in the second half, where
there are several uses of the term “un-American”. This isn't
loading the term in an ideological debate within the framework of the
American polity; it's addressing the ethical and moral basis of that
polity itself, and how it was subverted or simply trampled by the Bush
government. And because we in Britain don't have that deeply
conditioned perspective about such pervasive values that define our
country and us as citizens, it doesn't connect with us. It rests
on a sense of nation and civics that we don't share; consequently, when
its concerns are all bounded by and defined within that sense, we miss
the basic definition and see only the detail, the trees and not the
wood. Arguably it's a fault that the play takes so much as read,
but it is only arguable. I think the most we can say from where
we stand is that it hasn’t travelled well at all.
Written for Theatre Record.