‘Why did you do it, Johnny?” asks the Balladeer in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, which forced John Wilkes Booth to share the limelight with a slew of other slayers. Now Abraham Lincoln’s killer explains himself at length in Land of the Free, a deft and resourceful new play by the Simple8 company.
The ironies are a gift to any dramatist. Lincoln and Booth were both theatre nuts: Booth was an actor from a thespian family, and the president had seen him perform at Ford’s theatre, where they would have their fateful last meeting. But it’s how the director Sebastian Armesto and co-writer Dudley Hinton wrap, unwrap and rewrap that gift which enhances the material. Booth’s life is played out once in the first act, starting with a childhood performance of Julius Caesar, then revisited in the second with a shift of emphasis and a variety of theatrical forms: Shakespearean iambic pentameter, the odd musical number.
This is a play that knows it’s a play, and says so. A makeshift proscenium arch throws a frame around the floor-level stage, while red velvet curtains separate the foreground of the action from the background. Swishing open and closed to delineate scenes, they give the impression of the play repeatedly ending and restarting. This alludes to the cyclical nature of political violence, a theme that is restated once we meet the man who killed the man who killed Lincoln. Pinned on both sides of the stage are photographic reminders of assassination attempts successful (John F Kennedy) or otherwise (Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump).
The seven-strong company share multiple roles except for the magnetic Brandon Bassir, who devotes his energies fittingly to the bloody-minded Booth, a man who views the fatal bullet as “a strike against the elite”. Bassir introduces another layer of meta-textual commentary channelling Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle (who influenced Reagan’s would-be killer) whenever Booth slips into smarmy wooing mode. Meanwhile, Clara Onyemere would make a riveting Lincoln even without the irony of a Black female actor playing the role in a year which could give the US its first Black female president.
• At Southwark Playhouse Borough, London, until 9 November
