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Gripped by paranoia

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 25th June 2008

2,000 Feet Away
Bush

Relocated
Royal Court

The Chalk Garden
Donmar

America is nuts about paedophiles. That’s the take-home message of Anthony Weigh’s new play 2,000 Feet Away, which stars Joseph Fiennes. The title refers to a provision of Megan’s law which sets out the minimum permissible distance between the home of a paedophile and any place where children are likely to gather. The law has unintended consequences. A town can completely rid itself of sex offenders if enough inhabitants register their houses as children’s nurseries. The sex offenders are evicted and, deprived of any loyalty to a world they can never rejoin, they congregate in shoddy hotels where they help each other develop ruses to approach children while evading detection. Naturally a building full of nonces becomes a rather tempting target for vigilantes who want to lob petrol bombs. This is the grisly inferno the play examines. Everyone hovers close to nervous collapse. Middle America is portrayed as a quasi-medieval society gripped by paranoia and peopled by insular brooding burger-chomping dimwits who hug their demons close in order to preserve what remains of their sanity.

Joseph Fiennes plays a troubled, well-meaning deputy charged with the task of chaperoning a homeless sex offender around the state. As often when filmstars appear in the theatre, the wrong things strike you. His height for a start. The camera makes Fiennes darkly mesmerising but on stage he just seems a bit short and even faintly ordinary. The hair is thinning, the waistline is doing the opposite, and his skull is so narrow that one wonders if he was caught in infancy in the closing doors of a lift. The role is a good match for Fiennes’s speciality, the tortured loner, but he’s a hard character to warm to and the script doesn’t take him on a rewarding emotional journey. Same for the whole cast. Everyone suffers, nobody learns and the play is hobbled by its unwillingness to subject the issue to the thing it really demands, intelligent analysis. It ought to be an eye-opener, instead it’s a wrist-opener.

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