Woody Harrelson sends himself up mercilessly in this purposely offensive theatre-world farce from 2018, which continues writer David Ireland’s mission to shock audiences out of complacency.
The former Cheers star plays vain, brainless American movie idol Jay who’s agreed to appear in a violent Unionist play by Ulsterwoman Ruth (Louisa Harland) for English director Leigh (Andy Serkis) in London, in the mistaken belief it glorifies his Irish catholic heritage.
Jeremy Herrin’s production makes you guffaw one minute and recoil the next, partly because splendid gags sit alongside sequences in which the two men “hypothetically” discuss rape and Ruth defends the killing of innocent civilians, both of which land terribly right now. This is part of the point: there’s no time when such things should seem comfortable, and we’re more outraged by a jokey fiction than by awful fact.
But the play is lazy, the characters forced into absurd and improbable positions by the writer’s agenda. And behind the subjects it ostensibly confronts – misogyny, sexual violence, identity politics, cancellation by social media – I think it’s also about how awful it is to be a writer and have your work mutilated and misunderstood by idiot actors, directors and critics.
We’re in Leigh’s impeccably bourgeois bohemian home, where he is furiously necking wine to withstand a torrent of self-regarding LA blather from Jay, including details of his AA recovery programme (“no one told him the second A stands for anonymous,” growls Leigh later). The two men are so keen to signal their liberal, feminist credentials they explain the Bechdel test to each other.
This is a great gag – it’d be even funnier if I explained it here – but feeds directly into the pivotal “what if?” exchange about rape. Then Ruth arrives from Belfast, delayed by a car crash that injured her mother. Initially giddy and hyper, she becomes steadily more forceful as the men patronise and pat her, and as the depths of Jay’s yawning incomprehension become more apparent.
Jay is a caricature but Harrelson’s performance of him is a masterpiece of timing and technique, from his yoga posing to his chin-juts: he carries the running gag about Jay wanting an eyepatch in the play superbly. Harland makes Ruth the most emotionally convincing character while Serkis waffles, blusters and rages about Brexit as Leigh.
But really, I didn’t believe these people had ever met each other, or another real human being before. The violent ending is both hilarious and gratuitous. It’s pretty amazing that Woody Harrelson’s in Hammersmith over the Christmas period, but the vehicle he’s arrive in is a dodgy one.
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