I’ve now seen enough of Alistair
Beaton’s work to be fairly confident that it’s not just coincidence, a
series of bad days or anything of that sort: I simply think he’s
overrated as a satirist. Plays such as
Feelgood (2001, about Blairism),
Follow My Leader (2004, about the
politics of Gulf War II) and
King Of
Hearts (2007, about the royal succession) all have an assured
dramatic flow and contain a slew of topical references, but the actual
business of each piece – the satiric bite – never draws blood. It is
always too blunt, in the sense either of timidity or of crassness or
both.
Fracked, about the
manipulation of public and political opinion for selfish corporate
ends, fits the pattern entirely. It moves easily, in Richard Wilson’s
staging, between the offices of an unscrupulous PR company representing
a fracking firm and the living room of a cottage in the village about
to become its testing ground, as an elderly lady and her even more
cautious husband (Anne Reid and James Bolam) are gradually awakened to
the value of direct action. Beaton has kept matters up to date by
adding a clutch of lines about this being a day-after-tomorrow,
post-Brexit Britain... and which chimed with the press-night audience
so much that the remark “This is England – we don’t do human rights any
more” drew approving applause.
However, the comedy itself is not driven by the blindness of Deerland
Energy and the various legal and ecological enormities being committed,
but by easy stereotypes: the company’s chief and his old-fashioned
manners, the ease with which he is gulled by the oily, foul-mouthed PR
flack (Oliver Chris in the kind of role he can play in his sleep), the
New Agey activist who hugs, meditates and calls people “dude”, and so
on. It’s a timely subject – and Chichester is itself in an area which,
depending on future economic trends, could well see the
hydraulic-fracturing extraction of shale gas in years to come – but a
deceptively antiquated play in its approach and structure. And
toothless satire, by creating the image of opposition but never
actually posing a threat, ends up reinforcing what it is ostensibly
challenging.
Written for the Financial
Times.