Review: Charles III

One year in middle school, my very liberal social studies teacher (the same one who went on periodic rants about how Andrew Jackson should be taken off the twenty-- which he should be, by the way) taught us about the odd little laws encoded in some of our state's land use and real estate legislation, including fun little tidbits like it being illegal to sell certain pieces of land to African Americans. Obviously these were eventually superseded by civil rights legislation, but that's also why they remained on the books, inactive. It's amusing and in some sense slightly chilling to realize that there are arcane little bits of retrograde weirdness lying dormant within our legal system, perhaps just waiting for someone who is sufficiently clever and bigoted to find a way to carve them out.

In England, of course, that vestigial legal oddity is hidden in plain sight: the monarchy. It's still there. It sucks up massive amounts of taxpayer money. They have no power, but because England lacks a written constitution, that fact is maybe more of a gentleman's agreement than a law. At least, that's the tenuous situation that Mike Bartlett's fabulous King Charles III, now on the West End after opening last spring at the Almeida, proposes.

Shortly after the death of his mother but before his own official coronation, now-King Charles is growing anxious and perhaps (as Camilla says) a bit angsty about the end of his long wait and his imminent rise to... well, not power, exactly. Anxious to make the monarchy meaningful, and spurred on by some dubious politicians, Charles declines to sign a bill into law, setting off a chain of events that seem as if they might plunge the country into civil war.

Also it's written entirely in iambic pentameter.

King Charles III is Shakespearean not only in its language and scope, but in its approach to the question of power. Prince Harry raises what I sometimes see as the central question of Shakespeare's historical tragedies: can't bring a modern prince mean not having to give away your soul? Charles himself has very much the air of Richard II-- petulant, power-hungry, and increasingly bordering on madness-- yet also undeniably appealing in his bumbling yearning for self-definition and winning candor with the audience. Tim Pigott-Smith's marvelous performance keeps the character from flying off into caricature, rooting him soundly in something touching and human.

The other characters privileged to speak to the audience are William (Oliver Chris) and Kate (Lydia Wilson), the latter of whom nearly steals the show with the revelation of an iron will and powerful ambition. There are gestures towards Lady Macbeth as she none-too-subtly steers the somewhat hapless William towards power, but Kate's masterful command of the trappings of modern-day royalty are unparalleled in the play, and she's ultimately too canny to just condemn.

The one major misstep is Prince Harry's strangely underdeveloped subplot. Disillusioned in a Prince Hal-ish fashion with life and royalty, he falls in love with a commoner, a flat Manic Pixie Dream Girl whose dearth of personality leaves their storyline nowhere to go. It's a shame, as Richard Goulding's tortured Harry serves, when he is alone, as a neat parallel to his father's crisis of self, and as mentioned above, the potential for Shakespearean-inspired exploration and allusion is rich (director Rupert Goold pointed out Harry's similarities to Hal in an interview) But Bartlett ultimately seems to lose track of the thread, tying it off in an abrupt but not unexpected manner. But this is basically the only false note in an otherwise masterfully orchestrated piece.

The morning after seeing King Charles III, I woke up to the latest from Ferguson, MO, and the grand jury's failure to indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown. On the one hand, this seems to exist on an incomparably different scale from an often silly British political drama. But the question in both cases is the dangerous ease with which our democratic systems can collapse in the face of someone determined to ignore the unwritten rules, or to lean too heavily on the letter of a law we thought we'd all agreed to ignore. One of Barlett's most brilliant choices is to make Charles basically right: the bill he declines to sign is a draconian-sounding privacy law that would curtail the freedom of the press. But, as the Prime Minister in the play says again and again, the question at hand is not the content of the bill, but the principle behind Charles's action. It's not a monarch's role to dictate policy by omission any more than it seems fair for a prosecutor to manipulate an indictment.

And in this, Charles' fears and his rebellious subjects' fears are one and the same: the fear of loss of control, of society suddenly ceasing the function the way you always thought it did. That after a lifetime of waiting and preparing, it turns out there's nothing at the end of it after all. The heart of the play is deeply human, and in this Bartlett is Shakespearean once again: somehow, the stories of kings always seem to end up as tragedies.

Review: James I and James II

For the record, the title of the first two parts of The James Plays at the National Theatre are The Key Will Keep the Lock and Day of The Innocents, respectively. I could not for the life of me remember either of these all day, and in fact misremembered the second play's title the first time I typed it out. But you're in good shape when the only uninteresting thing about your play is the title. The first two of the three James Plays are sharp, exciting, and moving contemporary versions of a Shakespearean history play. 

It's quite exciting to see, for once, a history play in which I knew absolutely none of the history. Admittedly, this came to result in some missed moments (is a lord furiously declaring to his king that his people will hate him forever prophetic, or ironic?), but it also made it easy to accept Rona Munro's plays as the exciting dramas-- I would even go so far as to say tragedies-- that they are. 

Some of Shakespeare's history plays, including Richard III and King John, were variously billed as histories and tragedies, which reflects the uncertain place this emergent dramatic form held in the early modern period. But it also draws attention to how often a history play-- especially a history play centered around a single figure-- can look very similar to a fictional tragedy. At least in the first two parts of the James Plays, Munro seems to be suggesting that you cannot tell a story about a king that is not a tragedy. As Shakespeare himself explored before her, it seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that becoming a good king (or a good political ruler of any kind, for that matter) means selling part of your soul. 

There is something really striking about seeing such self-consciously Shakespearean plays telling Scottish history in the same year as an independence referendum. The ghost of Shakespeare is, in some ways, addressed head on in the first scene of James I, where the first king to enter and speak is not James himself, but King Henry V (Jamie Sives, who returns as James III), here portrayed as a blustering, swearing bully who nevertheless makes good use of his short reign. It's also a useful warning shot: the titles and structures may suggest Shakespeare's histories, but this is a place where his heroes are turned upside down, the saviors and villains of the history of the British Isles inverted.  

At the beginning of James I, King James I has spent 18 years as a captive in the courts of Henry V and Henry IV, and has passed the years studying history and writing love poetry (some of which is used as lyrics in the very lovely songs-- performed by  ensemble member Fiona Wood and composed by Paul Leonard-Morgan-- interspersed throughout the play). The tremendously good James McArdle is stammering, unassuming, and easily cowed by the forceful Henry, who humiliates him in front of a band of aristocratic Scottish prisoners, then orders him to return to Scotland for the first time in his adult life to secure English interests there, including forcing peace on the borders and raising the money for his own ransom. 

Aside from various modern stylistic choices, and of course a modern vocabulary of expletives, one of the ways Munro diverges most strikingly from a Shakespearean model-- and indeed, from the pattern of historical films and plays today-- is her dedication to creating a place for female characters. A sequence in which a battlefield and childbed are simultaneously present onstage exemplifies Munro's insistence that the devalued roles of women are equally historically important as the battles and treaties guided by men. In James I, this is displayed primarily by her sensitive portrayal of Joan (Stephanie Hyam), James's 17-year-old English consort. 

From King Henry's opening attempts to instruct James on how to be a ruthless king like himself, to the gradual revelation of the real reasons behind James's imprisonment, Munro expertly weaves James's life story in and over on itself, each incident and episode echoing alongside what we've heard and learned and seen and been warned until it culminates at last in a truly moving final battle against an unexpected enemy I have no wish to spoil. It was in this sequence that my lack of knowledge of history was most exciting: I had no idea what was going to happen, and only Munro's excellently crafted framework to guide my expectations. 


James II moves at a blistering pace, feeling rather shorter than James I, even though it clocked in ten minutes longer at our performance. Though no Englishmen appear, I couldn't help but think about Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV, as it too tells the parallel stories of a prince and a nobleman's son, one learning to come into his own and the other apparently destined to be a disappointment. But unlike Prince Hal and Hotspur, King James II and William Douglas are best friends from childhood-- which we learn through a fascinating flashback/dream sequence that mixes light, dance, and puppetry to tell the blood-soaked story of James II's childhood and accession to the throne at age 6. 

James II (Andrew Rothney), marked by a vibrant wine-stain birthmark on his face and still controlled by a regency government at age 19, is lively but unstable, plagued by violent nightmares of his past and unable to control the acts his regents undertake in his name. Meanwhile, William (Mark Rowley) is a drinking, raiding, high-spirited disgrace to his physically and verbally abusive father, whom we have seen connive his way from the simpering, landless Balvenie in James I into the Earl of Douglas (Peter Forbes).

James II is less tightly constructed than its predecessor-- the fascinating nightmare sequences drop away, and in the second act overall it feels as if important steps on James and William's emotional journeys have been elided. But it all ties together in the end, if not quite as perfectly as James I, as resonantly and in a more viscerally shocking way. 

Munro and director Laurie Sansom draw neat lines between the first two parts, both in lines that echo each other across plays and in clever double-casting-- Henry V and James III, as mentioned above, but also Stephanie Hyam as both James's foreign wives, Andrew Rothney as a rebellious lordling in James I, and Gordon Kennedy as a pair of very different regents. I expect more will emerge in part three. 

Judging by other critics, who insist that the plays be taken as a trilogy, it seems inappropriate to say anything conclusively until I've seen James III. So all I will say is that I'm looking forward to it very much. 

Review: Pitcairn

A familiarity with playwright Richard Bean's transatlantic hit One Man, Two Guvnors will do more than you might expect to prepare you for his new play Pitcairn (now at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre via Chichester, and soon to be off to various other locations) a violent historical drama about the famous mutineers of the Bounty and the utopia they attempted to form on Pitcairn Island once the mutiny was done. At first it seemed like a fairly huge leap from a cheeky Goldoni rewrite to a slice of obscure colonial history (with some biting social satire in the middle with Great Britain, which transferred from the National Theatre to the West End and which I haven't yet seen). But what these plays share is a sense of the chaos that lies just beneath the surface in any society, no matter how idealistic or how polished. In One Man, Two Guvnors, this took the form of the barely controlled chaos of Francis's attempted deception and the fantastically melodramatic efforts of the various lovers to find each other. Pitcairn, on the other hand, turns on more troubling questions of what, exactly, apparently unjust laws and social hierarchies are designed to hold in check. 

This is a pretty pessimistic view of human nature. But no one comes out terribly well in 18th century history, do they. As if mutiny and murder weren't enough to contend with, there's the entrenched classism, racism, sexism, and slavery, too. And on Pitcairn, all of these are forced into the crucible of a one-mile by two-mile island populated by just a handful of British sailors and Tahitian men and women. As Richard Bean noted repeatedly in the pre-show talk that I attended, beyond that, no one really knows what happened on Pitcairn. Only one participant in the mutiny was alive by the time the inhabitants of Pitcairn were discovered, and his accounts of what took place were inconsistent. And as the conclusion of Bean's play emphasizes, it's more than likely that he would have had good reason to be dishonest about what he saw and did. 

Bean's Fletcher Christian (only in his mid-twenties at the time of the mutiny, played by a splendid Tom Morely) is an idealist, equally convinced of the doctrines of social equality gaining currency at the time, and that their former captain, Bligh, did not die when they left him out at sea, and will be returning to see him hanged. The parallel currents of passion and paranoia undermine Christian's visions of utopia from the start. 

In the pre-show talk, Bean said that once he learned that the play would be performed at the Globe, he made some rewrites, including the addition of two characters who function as narrators and interact directly with the audience. Director Max Stafford-Clark sends them out into the audience to speak to the groundlings, asking questions and demanding actual answers. Hiti (Eben Figuelredo) is a Tubayan teenager who longs to join the sexual utopia the British have promised. Mata (Cassie Layton) is the Tahitian wife of Christian's fellow officer Ned Young (Ash Hunter), stolen from Tahiti in the dead of night. Her early delight with what the English soldiers have to offer quickly fades as she and Hiti bring us through a series of episodic incidents that illustrate the downfall of society on Pitcairn. 

Hiti and Mata are never quite able to use their nuanced narrative voices in the actual scenes, which are unquestionably dominated by the Englishmen. The group of wives, led by the two women who had been upper-caste back on Tahiti, stage interesting debates about who they are and where they belong, but they become a chorus of dissenting and agreeing voices, and few distinct pictures of actual characters emerge from among them. The same is largely true of the English, however, with Fletcher Christian the most obvious exception, at least until his eleventh hour scheme forces us to wonder how well we have really known him at all. This is all perhaps a necessary sacrifice when working with such a large cast, and it does not make the unfolding of events any less compelling. 

There are many tonal similarities between this and the Globe's other current contemporary play, Doctor Scroggy's War. Pitcairn is also frequently very funny, though the cards are laid out on the table very early: Hiti explains in one of his early monologues that "good days are life, and bad days are history," and he is here to tell us history. 

But what is history, anyway? Pitcairn is framed by the discovery of the island and its inhabitants by some Royal Navy officers many years after the mutineers land, when only one man is left alive in the aftermath of the carnage we subsequently witness, and he immediately starts telling stories about what has happened. Hiti and Mata tell different stories, and Fletcher Christian more, including railing against the power of the Bible to force men into submission to unjust authority. The stories they tell-- and the languages they tell them in, as highlighted by the warring use of English, Tahitian (though spoken onstage in English, but identified as Tahitian by changed accents and the men's responses to hearing it) and even the medium of the women's ritualized dances-- carry the power to create and destroy marriages, shape the future of their community, and sanction murder. 

Watching what he believed to be objective truths about human nature and society's potential dissolve before him, Christian seems to go slowly mad. But is it really because of wrecked idealism, or is it due to love? Are betrayals between the men rooted in classism and racism, or as revenge for long-ago slights on the Bounty? The what and the why prove equally fluid, and the constant and never-resolved urge to seek answers to those questions is a large part of what makes the play so engaging. As one of the women asks early on, "Are we in England or Tahiti?" Or Eden? Or Hell? Whose narrative will dominate? 

Bean's narrative comes out in the end with a strange kind of hope, not necessarily for human goodness, but at least for human resilience. If nothing else, people do seem to survive. 

Review: Teh Internet is Serious Business

At one point in The Royal Court's production of Teh Internet is Serious Business [sic] by Tim Price, I had the thought "Man, I wish I could see the ball pit better." 

So there's a ball pit. Which should speak for itself. 

On the other hand, it's possible that you'd share the opinion of the woman behind me, who said loudly at the beginning of intermission, "This is just too weird for me," then spent the entire second act whispering to her husband, "When is this over?" Perhaps it's rude of me to single out this woman... but maybe I can also argue that that's in the spirit of the play itself, an anarchic, bizarre, and hilarious fictionalization of the exploits of LulzSec, an offshoot of the internet group Anonymous, who are famous for wearing Guy Fawkes masks and humiliating those who cross them. All of these titles project a false sense of centralization, one that Teh Internet in part perpetuates: there are no leaders or official membership in Anonymous. But the two central characters of Teh Internet are at least based on real people-- specifically, Jake Davis and Mustafa al-Bassam, who were arrested in 2011 for their participation in Anonymous's activities.

This arrest is where the play begins, at which point we go backwards to discover how Jake, an agoraphobic Shetlander, and Mustafa, a bored 15-year-old maybe-genius, found themselves falling in with the bizarre online world of 4Chan (the larger forum Anonymous grew out of) and Anonymous. What begins as escapes from their mundane lives and profound loneliness becomes something both deeper and more dangerous, though the tension between the ethos of 4Chan-- that nothing should be taken seriously, and that everything must be done "for the lulz," or for the amoral fun of it-- and the opportunity to use their abilities and influence achieve social change runs taut through the play, and creates its most interesting conflicts. 

Price depicts some of Anonymous and LulzSec's most famous early exploits, including takedowns of Scientology, Sony, Fox, and various government websites in Tunisia. The play feels particularly timely, as the group has been in the news once again in the wake of the events in Ferguson, MO. A member of Anonymous released the personal information (an act known as doxing) of the police officer believed to have shot Michael Brown, only for it to be quickly revealed that he'd identified the wrong person. 

The first half of Teh Internet, however, mostly revels in the utter weirdness of 4Chan's internet culture, which is often a fairly good reflection of internet culture more broadly. In the process, it offers an intriguing and perhaps unintentional suggestion: live theatre may be the perfect medium for depicting the internet. The elegant gestural vocabulary and athletic dance sequences that represent coding, the actors in cat costumes representing the many famous internet cats, links (including, naturally, several Rickrolls) popping up out of trap doors, chatroom members dressed like Spider-Man and Captain Picard to represent their online aliases, memes literally wandering by-- director Hamish Pirie captures better than a more literal medium could the short attention span and topic-hopping silliness of an internet forum or Facebook feed. 

This is likely what alienated my fellow audience member. Price resists any traditional structuring, and the play features many episodes and digressions and little in the way of overarching plot. But this is a perfect match for its subject matter. How could a play about the internet possibly follow traditional rules? The piece does become most interesting in the second half, however, when Luke and Mustafa's online and offline lives embark on a more direct collision course, and Price begins to investigate that contrast more deeply. 

The dehumanizing nature of the internet also hobbles the play somewhat. Anonymity is right there on the label, and the impossibility of truly knowing the people that have made up their makeshift family becomes a sticking point for the characters in the second half of the play. The consequence of this-- that only our viewpoint characters Luke and Mustafa can be truly rounded characters-- does emphasize the episodic feel of their adventures with LulzSec, and can make the secondary characters' debates about the safety and propriety of their actions feel unimportant, as we have little sense of who these people really are. 

But, on the other hand, this is partly the point. Both Luke and Mustafa are profoundly socially awkward. Luke is, as previously mentioned, agoraphobic, which contrasts painfully to his role as LulzSec's charismatic PR man. Mustafa seems like he could perhaps be on the autism spectrum, and if not, at least has no friends to speak of and turns to chatrooms initially to get practice talking to people. Anonymous is their only safe means of connecting to others. When a fellow Anonymous member is doxed, his identity published online, it's a toss-up whether Luke flees his company just out of fears about his own privacy, or because the revelation means that there is now a real person with a family and a job and needs to face instead of a username in a Guy Fawkes mask. 

In attempting to find a vocabulary to tell stories that exist online and in the real world simultaneously, Teh Internet is treading somewhat new and very important ground. I can't pretend that Teh Internet is Serious Business is the first play to deal with these formal questions, but it's the first I've seen. Given that, its successes far outweigh the places where it falters. It is a thoroughly delightful and unflaggingly entertaining evening of theatre, and it careens along to an unexpected and lovely ending. 

Most of all, thought, I came away from Teh Internet is Serious Business with hope for the medium of theatre itself the likes of which I haven't felt in a very long time. The cast is large and racially diverse, the subject matter contemporary and relevant without feeling tabloid-y or shallow, and most of all, the play makes full use of the power and potential of live theatre to tell a story that is inescapably modern and to depict the most important platform of the modern age. In the very near future, I think telling stories that take place at least partially on the internet will become inescapable. Theatre has an amazing opportunity to become the best medium for telling those stories. 

Review: Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies

There are two things to love, basically, about Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell series, a trilogy of which two books have been published, which is being made into a mini-series starring Mark Rylance, and which the Royal Shakespeare Company has adapted into a pair of stage plays, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies. These two things are Mantel's prose, which can be dense and confusing but I find intoxicatingly rich and thoughtful; and the man himself, Thomas Cromwell. Her Cromwell becomes almost a proto-populist, a self-made man who ascended from the slums of Putney to King Henry VIII's right hand, thoughtful, impossibly brilliant, and brutal. Only one of these things can be translated to the stage with much grace. Luckily, playwright Mike Poulton and the RSC recognized this, and bring to the stage two exciting historical dramas that are unencumbered by attempts to weave in Mantel's narration and anchored by the fascinating and wonderfully portrayed figure of Cromwell himself.

It seems unlikely that these rather long and historically heavy adaptations would have made it to the West End (with a Broadway run to follow next spring) without a Cromwell as perfectly cast as Ben Miles. True, he doesn't quite match the Holbein portrait, nor the frequent description of Cromwell in the books as looking like a murderer. But bulked out by black sixteenth century garb, continually forced to doff his black skullcap, he is a man who can never manage to recede into the shadows like his social superiors think he ought to. 

"Why do you have to be such a person?" the Duke of Norfolk complains of Cromwell in the novel (the last cut line I'll quote, I promise). Miles's personhood is equally undeniable, and what we lose from the intimacy of Mantel's prose, we gain back with his expressive performance. Beneath his intimidating appearance and dry wit, it is easy to believe in the loyalty and love that lie at the heart of most of what he tries to do-- and also to see those generous impulses convincingly curdle into something more vicious by the second play's end. 

The subject matter is essentially the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife and mother of the future Queen Elizabeth I. This trajectory is shadowed and aided by Cromwell, who escapes the wreckage of the career and life of his former master Cardinal Wolsey with promises to both the King and Anne that he can do what the Cardinal could not: secure Henry a divorce. But as Anne falls out of favor, despite her threats to bring Cromwell with her, he becomes the instrument of her downfall, taking to heart to the lessons learned from Wolsey's fall. 

Jeremy Herrin's inventive staging hearkens back to the Shakespearean history play in which these pieces clearly have their roots with a largely bare stage and fluid scenic transitions. Cromwell rarely exits, more often facilitating scene changes by retreating to a downstage corner to bow to whatever member of the nobility is newly entering. Elaborate period dances convey the tense social geography of the court without any dialog at all, and a court play involving a caricature of Cardinal Wolsey and some devils is as attention-grabbing and chilling as its lasting resonance in the plot demands. 

The costumes are, as should be expected, quite stunning, and go far to helping differentiate the actors who are playing multiple characters. Paule Constable creates some truly beautiful lighting effects, particularly to highlight the ends of acts. There is live music, which is always exciting, and it features an interesting and effective mix of period and contemporary instruments. 

The plays are very much structured as a pair: the first is inconclusive, and the second offers refreshers but no detailed explanations about who these people are or what is going on. Poulton's streamlining of the storytelling is masterful, and he has a keen sense of how to replace and reshuffle minor characters in order to make the best use of his necessarily limited cast. The conflation of several Wolsey servants in early scenes into the lute player Mark Smeaton is a particularly well-crafted example of this. He is less forward-thinking about foreshadowing many of Anne's ladies-in-waiting (with Jane Seymour the obvious exception), resulting in the late introduction of figures such as Mary Shelton and Lady Worcester who offer crucial information but, especially due to the tight doubling of the female actors, somewhat blur together. Poulton also does not trouble himself with leaving room for a part three, which allows him to excise some characters who are featured in the first two novels, but seem destined to come into their own in the third; notably, Thomas "Call-Me-Risley" Wriothesley. 

Cromwell is faced with four major counterparts: his sometimes-ally Anne, who simultaneously sees his use as a fellow advocate of Protestantism and as a devilishly effective lawyer, but resents his rise to power and his low class. Sir Thomas More, on the other hand, does not seem to begrudge Cromwell his background, but cannot tolerate his schismatic religious views and his political utilitarianism. Though the men offer frequent protestations of friendship, they are difficult to believe. 

In the opposite corner, his more devoted allies: Wolsey (a delightful Paul Jesson) and eventually King Henry, though the latter's childlike mercuriality, wonderfully captured by Nathaniel Parker, is hardly solid ground for building on, and the increasingly large collection of ghosts that drift through both plays are a frequent reminder of what ending up on the wrong side of one of Henry's fancies can mean.

Onstage ghosts can be just plain tacky, but they are masterfully deployed here. Though they haunt the stage, Cromwell himself does not seem particularly troubled by them (or at least, all but one), and carries on fairly casual chats with his former mentor and former enemies. Especially in Bring up the Bodies, they offer the rare opportunities to see Cromwell basically alone. Poulton has, understandably, largely removed Cromwell's family life, though his wife Lizzie, son Gregory, and protege Rafe Sadler remain. By slimming down their roles and removing the arcs they experience in the books, Rafe (Joshua Silver, dry and charming) especially takes on a new and interesting role. Throughout, he is Cromwell's shadow, perennially armed with a ledger and quill and dressed in black or dark green. As the second play went on, I realized he was increasingly filling-- in a quite literal, physical way-- the role that Cromwell once did, standing at the shadows of scenes, so silent and attentive that sometimes it took me until midway through the action to realize that he was even there, watching, listening, taking notes. 

I was skeptical of the many upcoming adaptations of Mantel's books, largely because, as mentioned, her prose is so distinctive and powerful. A lesser adaptation would have featured pages of direct address, perhaps characters narrating their own thoughts and actions in an attempt to bring along some of her beautiful words and the fascinating webs of interiority that her third-person perspective allows. In some ways, removing this access turns the plays into a more traditional account of the marriage of Anne Boleyn. But Poulton, Herrin, and Miles have captured the heart of Mantel's Cromwell, and he in turn forms the heart of plays that seem to be made in his own image: fast-paced, forceful, funny, chilling in their depiction of tyranny and shadowed always by the will of an immature and changeable king, the promise that every spectacular rise will be followed by a fall.  

Review: Doctor Scroggy's War

There’s a moment in the second act of Doctor Scroggy’s War when Major Gillies, a military surgeon and one of the central characters, speculates about how best to describe suffering. What is the proper adjective? The hammer? The waltz? How can we talk about mass suffering? I’ve admired thus far the English responses to the one hundredth anniversary of World War One, kicking off this August. Notably, this includes the ceramic poppies filling the moat at the Tower of London, one for every soldier killed in the war. The production of Doctor Scroggy’s War, set in World War One and written by Howard Brenton, was also programmed with the anniversary in mind.

There’s probably no one today who would bother to argue that World War One was necessary. An utterly senseless loss of life, the tragic clash of old-fashioned tactics with cutting edge technology, slaughter and destruction on a scale no one had ever seen.   One unforeseen consequence was the extent of the violent facial injuries suffered by the soldiers in the trenches. After the war, it’s said, some European towns placed special benches in their parks, brightly painted, so that passersby would know that the men sitting on them were horrifically disfigured and could avert their eyes or alter their path as necessary.

The characters in Brenton’s play are kinder than this, which is perhaps surprising in light of some of his brutal earlier works. But perhaps he found that the facts of the war itself were vicious enough without also plunging into every possible depth of human cruelty; the eponymous Doctor Scroggy’s war, running in parallel to the big one, is in part a battle of human resilience in the face of unfathomable and pointless violence and suffering—and in that conflict, ultimately, lies Brenton’s tragedy. Because like World War One, it’s a battle where victory can be as devastating as defeat.

            The play begins in 1915, and deals with the intertwined lives of Major Harold Gillies (James Garnon), a pioneer in facial reconstructive surgery who is both appalled and fascinated by the opportunity presented by the war; and Captain Jack Twigg (Will Featherstone), a “temporary gentleman” who is another in dramatic literature’s long history of boys eager to prove themselves in battle.

“You know what’s going to happen to me,” Jack says suddenly to the audience in act one, and of course, we do. It often feels like war stories all follow the same playbook. You’re sure you know what will happen as soon as you meet the arrogant young lordling, the society miss who claims to disdain officers, as soon as a young soldier’s mother prays nothing will harm her son’s beautiful eyes. But Brenton finds unexpected cracks and angles, not the least of which is the premise of the play itself: the work performed by Major Gillies and the injuries suffered by his patients. While Gillies in part wages a war against fear, despair, and the other psychological wounds that we now so widely recognize as souvenirs of battle, the bandaged faces of the soldiers in act two are a striking visual reminder of the physical toll that, strangely, often feels forgotten. In old war stories, men either live or die. Maybe sometimes they’ll lose a leg or even an arm, which is of course traumatic, but always seems to be something you believe they’ll manage to move past.

            “He has no face,” is a frequent refrain. It’s something that I found disturbingly difficult to imagine. In a film of this story, I assume one would be treated to plenty of lurid shots of missing noses and shattered jaws, or perhaps euphemistic angles and lighting all building to a shocking reveal. But director John Dove does not try to replicate this with stage makeup or prosthetics. It results on the one hand, in the imaginative gap that I mentioned: the actors do have faces, of course, even swaddled beneath bandages. But as it was said again and again-- “he has no face,” “he has no face”-- and I found I still couldn’t imagine what that might look like, the pain and horror of the circumstances became much clearer than any fright makeup could make it.

In certain moments, Brenton and Dove do seem to long for modern stage conventions, particularly blackouts, which the Globe’s open air lighting scheme forbids. But on the whole they made good use of the theatre’s demands, notably well-used direct address and asides to the audience. Even though it’s a new play, the actors aren’t scared to engage the audience like Shakespeareans, and the cast without exception is engaging and skilled.

This all sounds very heavy, which it is, but that means it’s necessary to mention the fantastic lightheartedness that permeates most of the play, and not just the ironic levity of the bright young chaps who chat happily about what a lark battle will be. The play is largely very funny, which comes to be part of Major Gillies’ point. How do you talk about suffering? You can’t, at least not continually. And both Gillies and, fortunately, Mr. Brenton recognize that even beginning to understand suffering and carnage on the scale of World War One requires a break to laugh.