James Graham has done more to bring
matters of civic engagement into popular theatre than any writer in a
generation. What seems on the face of it like a rather disarming
politics-geekery (as in plays such as
This
House and
Labour Of Love)
reaches wider.
Ink, one of
his two plays currently in the West End, uses the birth of the
Sun newspaper to examine links
between politics, media and entertainment. Now
Quiz, which on the face of it deals
with one of the great British television scandals of recent years, does
the same as regards entangling entertainment and justice.
In 2001 Charles Ingram, an army major, was accused of cheating his way
to the top prize on TV game show
Who
Wants To Be A Millionaire? with the guidance of significant
coughs from the audience; he, his wife and another competitor, Tecwen
Whittock, were prosecuted in 2003. Graham and director Daniel Evans
cleverly use a hybrid courtroom/game-show dramatic format to look at
the matter from all angles. The play touches on the British fondness
for quizzing before giving a whistletop tour of TV quiz shows, with
Keir Charles playing a range of celebrity questionmasters; audience
members are invited onstage as contestants, and on press night designer
Lez Brotherston was thankful that this wasn’t one of his own stage sets
as he competed in a mock-heat of
Bullseye.
The focus then tightens to the story of the Ingrams (Gavin Spokes and
Stephanie Street) while also revealing the ways in which
Millionaire is structured (or
rigged, as some would say) to encourage popular interest, and various
techniques to circumvent its constraints. There are even audience votes
on the couple’s guilt after the first act (prosecution) and second
(defence); the radical difference (on opening night, anyway) between
the two votes makes its own point about our susceptibility to media.
(In real life all three accused were convicted but given non-custodial
sentences.)
Graham also comments, briefly but significantly, on the televisation of
parliamentary proceedings and the campaign to allow cameras into
courtrooms, keeping us aware in the moment that we are being
manipulated by the piece. It’s not perfect – the second half, for
instance, feels much more flatteringly “serious” than the first – but
it confirms that Graham’s talent is for animating his fascination with
how we involve ourselves as citizens.
Written for the Financial
Times.