It has been a weird 10 days in the theatre: strong shows but hard times. The Dorries Diktat – that Arts Council England money should be moved out of London – led to various anomalies, not least the disastrous decision to cut funding from one of the best of the capital’s theatres, the Donmar Warehouse, in the name of levelling up. Of course it matters where organisations are based. But buildings and geography are not the end of the story. In supporting the work of new writers and directors, the Donmar has always pumped fresh blood around the country. The theatre’s plans to support local organisations in Kent, the West Midlands and Nottinghamshire have now been crushed.
Meanwhile, the stage has been subjecting itself to inquisitions. For three days at the Royal Court, Martin Crimp wrote and performed his new play, a coruscation, driven by questions perpetual and immediate. When does pretending become fakery? Is fiction a lie? And, particularly current, can a dramatist “give voice” to any character?
That last question, of cultural appropriation, which Crimp feels is pressing on younger dramatists, is dodgy: no playwright actually gives someone else their voice. The stage is part mimicry, part makeup; it is response and creation. This complexity was brought to life in Not One of These People. In Christian Lapointe’s staging (he designed and directed), a stream of faces – brown, black, white, wrinkled, young, all genders – flashed up on a screen, accompanied by a battery of short lines. At first these were read by Crimp, then the photos began to move and slew, as if bubbling from beneath, and to speak in a mixture of the banal and the momentous: about pretending to be Russian, wishing you had different children, failing to kill yourself.
Sometimes lines and image seemed congruent, sometimes they were wildly unexpected, but, then, what sentence wouldn’t be unexpected from the mouth of a tiny baby? The contrasts were often high comedy, often saddening. They were always teasing, for the 299 faces on show had been generated by artificial intelligence. Does this make them more or less “real” than characters generated by a human mind?
The question of who speaks in whose voice is also animated in David Ireland’s brilliant new 50-minute sprint Not Now. On the day after his father’s funeral, in Ballybeen, east Belfast, a young man is rehearsing the opening speech from Richard III; he’s off to London to audition for a drama school that his uncle calls “Radar”. The boy overacts badly, all lolloping limbs and tortured Olivier vowels. The uncle – not at all thespy – thinks he should perform in his own accent, that he should play up the “Irish” thing, so loved by the English. His nephew protests: he is a loyalist; he is British; he doesn’t want to pretend to be something he is not. Then, asks his uncle, why do you want to be an actor?
Ireland’s dialogue is nonstop sparkle; the development of the play beautifully judged in Max Elton’s production, as the boy (Matthew Blaney) moves from gangle and sullenness to candour and the uncle (Stephen Kennedy) from joviality to reluctant disclosure. There is, as always with Ireland, an unflinching look at Protestant politics, but Not Now adds different notes. His greatest play so far, Cyprus Avenue, was a satire fuelled by an imaginative flight of which Jonathan Swift would have been proud. This drama has a new warmth. It also clinches on a beautiful reanimation of Shakespeare’s words about changing “dreadful marches to delightful measures”. After having heard about loyalist marches and watching reconciliation, the phrase has a startling, particular ring.
Jasmine Blackborow comes shooting out of the traps as a glowing talent in Super High Resolution. At first calm and humorous, increasingly wound round in a skein of desperation; becoming numb, yet never entirely ceasing to function. She is a diligent, capable person unravelling in an impossible job. She is a hospital doctor.
Nathan Ellis’s new play steadily emits the white heat of working in the NHS, spinning on its title, with Blackborow’s young clinician Anna pitting personal commitment and resolution against the impossibility of actually resolving problems exacerbated by scarce resources, strained nerves and crazily protracted hours. Catherine Cusack as Meredith, who has been longer in the job, is a terribly convincing warning of what may be to come: tautness, deafness to others.
Ellis is nimble on his comic toes, tweaking surprise throughout: in the topsy-turvy opening scene, the question “Are you OK?” is addressed by the person in civvies to the person in scrubs. Action straggles towards the end, when an overbusy plot is packed into what is really a case study; director Blanche McIntyre, so marvellously steady in her deep, close focus, could have done with getting her scissors out. Yet what a series of sharp moments are acted in front of Andrew D Edwards’s neat design: pleated blue hospital curtains are swished between scenes, both clinical and theatrical. And what performances. Lewis Shepherd makes a nonchalantly assured debut. Hayley Carmichael, seemingly frozen as she describes her mysterious injuries, is distress incarnate: it is as if her expressions are slightly out of her reach, at arm’s length from her words.
Star ratings (out of five)
Not One of These People ★★★★
Not Now ★★★★
Super High Resolution ★★★★
