Lloyd Evans
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The Royal Court’s stuffy little upstairs theatre is hosting a new play about cultural imperialism. D.C. Moore sets his scene in Helmand where a young English corporal finds himself morally compromised by his desire to torture a Taleban prisoner. The twist is that the prisoner is a norf-Lunnin geezer, of Asian extraction, claiming to have been kidnapped by insurgents while ‘holidaying’ in Kandahar. This device neatly brings the war back home and turns the play into an examination of the competing religious factions in Britain. And though the script is never less than absorbing, and often very funny too, it takes a while to hit cruising speed and the plot lacks complexity. Some of the minor characters are bizarrely under-used. (One actor, playing a proud Afghan warrior, prances on to the stage, widdles over the prisoner’s head and exits — his evening’s work finished in 17 seconds.)
The play’s chief asset is the salty tang of reality, the atmosphere of battle, the army jargon, the throttling heat, and the tensions between the grudging Brits and the Afghan toy soldiers they’re being paid to train. Bob Bailey’s shrapnel-raddled set literally throws the dust in your face. As the squaddies’ boots trample the rubble, a stifling white powder permeates the auditorium. I came out with sand in my ears. D.C. Moore proves himself a brilliant and cynical social commentator who doesn’t baulk at the rotten truth but embraces it with a necrophile’s relish and yet in one sense his quest for authenticity hobbles his drama. Towards the end, the Asian Londoner gets the chance to speak up and deliver a philippic against Western society but because the character is a complete dimwit his inarticulate speech disintegrates into a mass of incoherent swearing.
True to life, yes, but the play is cheated of a ringing climax. And I hope the house manager decides to turn the radiators off. At the show I saw, somebody fainted. This is rather inconvenient, not just for the fainter, and their bewildered companions, and the audience members disrupted as the dead weight is crowd-surfed towards the exit; it’s also demoralising for the cast. Some poor actor is delivering a vivid and moving soliloquy only to find the audience slipping into unconsciousness.
The Donmar has welcomed a first play by bestselling novelist Mark Haddon. It’s called Polar Bears and it goes like this. An intellectual marries a loony. Then he kills her, possibly by accident, possibly not. That’s it. I’ve given you the ending because Haddon gives it to us in the opening moments of the play. When the first scene had finished, and with the show barely a minute old, two stout shireswomen walked from the auditorium, snorting huffily. My salutations went with them. Their defiance had single-handedly raised the critical standards of London play-goers to heroic new levels. An hour later I wished I’d followed them.
What a strange exercise in demented whimsicality this is. Haddon is accustomed to the world of novels where authors are schooled to create characters that appeal to the book-buying public, that is to women. And when men write for women they produce a horrible, wheedling, candyfloss fluffiness. Now fluffiness may flourish very well in a paperback but it flops on the stage. Niceness writes white. The only engaging character in this crowd of woolly cretins is the one we’re supposed to hate — a greedy, cynical business-bully played by Paul Hilton. He’s terrific but he makes everyone else seem as shallow, mawkish and sentimental as a pink bunny-wabbit by comparison.
Haddon’s other difficulty is that he tells the story like a narrator on a Wurlitzer. He goes backwards, forwards and in circles all at once but he never gives us a clue whereabouts he is on the spiralling continuum. Understanding this play would test the soothsaying powers of Peter Kellner, Colonel Pinstripe and Tiresias. And on to this creaky substructure he grafts a selection of intellectual fruit fancies. Let’s have a philosophy lecture. Could somebody tell a short story? Maybe Jesus can give a talk on putrefaction? That girl there must have a hysterical phone conversation about fjords. Then she can burn a manuscript in a bucket. We definitely need a fake hanging scene. And how about some old quotes from Nietzsche? Yeah, crazy. Bung it all in. By listing these fripperies I’m making them sound a lot more interesting than they are on stage where they succeed only in boring us senseless because they don’t serve the story. And they don’t serve the story because there isn’t a story. This isn’t a play either, just some dashed-off portraits of a few bourgeois people having a lousy time. It might make a terrific book.
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