The music playing as we entered the
theatre was a perfect summation of the situation: Marvin Gaye wondering
“What’s Going On”. It must have seemed a terrific idea at the time:
producers Supporting Wall invited a number of writers to come up with
playlets within hours of the polls closing in Thursday’s general
election, to be staged for one night only in the West End last
Saturday. “The electorate have spoken,” as one character observed, but
what nobody had foreseen was that what they would say was “Um…”.
Consequently, by the writers’ deadline, the real drama of negotiation
had hardly even begun (even as I write this review after the
performance, little headway seems to have been made). These five
theatrical responses, then, mirrored the general state of indecision.
Two of the pieces were versions of classics. In Rex Obano’s
The Wrong Party, the character of
Stanley in Pinter’s
The Birthday
Party became a Cockney Gordon Brown, defiantly banging his toy
drum whilst being interrogated on his failure by two menacing men in
sharp suits. (Biggest groan line of the evening: “Which came first, the
chicken or the Clegg?”) In Phil Willmott’s
Act IV, the unseating and rapid
departure for Dubai of a sitting MP, leaving his staff behind in a
vacuum, mirrored the final act of Chekhov’s
Uncle Vanya, with an assortment of
relationships coming to naught and the bleak prospect of nothing save
another election in a few months’ time... although the campaign manager
didn’t try to shoot the ex-member.
Elsewhere, Anders Lustgarten’s
Bang
Up portrayed a group of disenfranchised prisoners watching
election-night TV, with sharp dialogue but little to say; Megan Ford’s
Human Interest focused on the
vacuity of party leaders’ wives’ appearances on daytime TV and imagined
a major breaking news story being spiked because it wouldn’t fit the
fluffy-trivia agenda of the genre; and Ché Walker’s
Two Thousand And Twelve ended the
evening on a dreary note, partly intentionally with its portrayal of a
near-future benefits office, partly accidentally because Perry Benson’s
linchpin performance failed to lift Walker’s thoughtful words off the
page (almost all performers still carried scripts). And, in another
fine metaphor, none of the plays offered a neat ending, but rather
continuing frustration and uncertainty.
Written for the Financial
Times.