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Fun with Vermeer

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 8th October 2008

Girl with a Pearl Earring
Theatre Royal Haymarket

Waste
Almeida

Creditors
Donmar

At the Almeida there’s a handsome revival of Harley Granville Barker’s 1930s political drama, Waste. Henry Trebell is a rising star whose career falters after a fling with a married lover results in an unwanted pregnancy. These elements are set out lucidly and intelligently, but the background details puzzled me. Henry, the great hope of the opposition party, has a pet scheme to disestablish the Church of England and turn its deconsecrated buildings into a new generation of pioneering schools. What? No government-in-waiting would place such a needlessly disruptive measure at the heart of its manifesto. And Church reform could never be the issue that propels a statesman to eminence. Granville Barker’s political radar isn’t half as acute as his supporters think. But his repartee always sparkles, if it doesn’t quite dazzle, and he parades a memorable array of pushy MPs and country-house plotters.

Nancy Carroll’s unstable needy Amy is movingly done and Phoebe Nicholls is superb as Henry’s solemn, adoring sister. The centre of the play is the complex, compromised Henry, a clever misogynistic super-wonk. Will Keen’s wheedling cold-kipper performance gets us two thirds of the way there but we never like this Henry, let alone love him, and it’s hard to see how his colleagues could regard such a back-room smart alec as a ‘political genius’. Even useless politicians have a touch of warmth, humour and amiability. This is an admirable production very much in the Peter Hall tradition of ‘Mondeo Theatre’, pleasingly presented, mechanically sound, faultlessly acted and rather short of surprises. The last act drags (the writer’s fault entirely) as Granville Barker tries, and fails, to give his neat, eloquent English play some of the dreamy poetic depth of Chekhov.