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Teletubby approach

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

The President’s Holiday
Hampstead

The Sea
Haymarket

The Vertical Hour
Royal Court

Shunting the whole nasty business of the coup to one side, she focuses on the Gorbachev family cooped up in their Crimean dacha surrounded by KGB plotters. Decent harmless folk, the Gorbachevs, but they’re more like a family facing a Christmas powercut than the leaders of a vast empire threatened by internal revolt. To add depth Gold includes arty interludes suggesting parallels between their house arrest and the massacre of the Tsar’s family. Laughably spurious, not least because the two coups are as different as chalk and Chernobyl. She draws Gorbachev as a pompous saint but it’s Raisa who really seizes her interest. Isla Blair plays her as she’s written, a doughty beaming head girl with misty eyes and a sheen of condescension who steers her posturing cretin of a husband towards sensible decisions. When a KGB guard arrives with a chocolate cake it’s Raisa who stops Gorbie stuffing it down his gob. Yes, that’s the level. Julius Caesar rewritten by one of the Teletubbies.

The Sea, Edward Bond’s 1973 costume drama, is tentatively subtitled ‘a comedy’. It’s funny in parts but it’s also complicated and a bit bonkers. We’re in a Norfolk village in 1907 where the drowning of a young grandee is being blamed on the draper, David Haig, who doubles as the coastguard. The community is dominated by Mrs Rafi, a Lady Bracknellish bully whose comic possibilities Eileen Atkins exploits to the hilt. The polished hostilities between her and her lady’s companion (Marcia Warren) are wonderfully entertaining. As is David Haig whose obsequious shopkeeper turns into a howling lunatic and suffers the most frenzied, sweat-drenched psychotic breakdown you’ll ever see. He must have to devour a kilo of pasta before every show.

So what does it all mean? Back in hippie times, angry playwrights loved the Edwardian era because the characters came ready-packed with ignorance and ‘irony’ (‘blindness’ literally) about their impending doom. But I detected no symbolic subtext here, no network of coded references, so I assume the play is to be taken at face value, as a dotty comedy drama. According to the programme this is its first revival in 35 years. Not surprised.

When the dust finally settles on Iraq we know who’ll have won. David Hare. What a fantastic war he’s had. Stuff Happens got a run at the National and his follow-up The Vertical Hour opened in New York with Bill Nighy and Julianne Moore in the lead roles. Now it’s boomeranged back here, with a new cast and director, and it’s bound to be a hit with the stop-the-war mob.