Punk Rock
Lyric Hammersmith
Judgment Day
Almeida
In rolls another bandwagon. And who’s that on board? It’s Simon Stephens, the playwright and panic profiteer, who likes to cadge a ride from any passing controversy. His latest play is about a teenage psycho who enacts a gory shoot-out at his local school. What a strange choice. Stephens frets vociferously in the programme notes about Britain’s ‘distrust’ and ‘marginalisation’ of its youngsters. With an episcopal air, and a peculiar turn of phrase, he asserts his ‘continuing faith’ in the young. ‘They get stuff. Sometimes they may lack the vocabulary always to articulate that which they understand but I have faith that they often understand it.’ (He used to be a teacher. A pity the children didn’t drum any grammar into him.)
As soon as the play begins, so do Stephens’s woes. He can’t write a story. Instead of assigning a dilemma or a mission to a specific character he sets in motion a great tidal wave of chitchat. It’s like watching a lexical life raft self-inflate. His teenage characters — most of them vicious little gits — ring perfectly false. They have an extraordinarily well-formed sense of their place in the world and they’re full of cocksure banalities expressed in cutely tailored language. ‘I wanted to kiss Thom Yorke once. And David Bowie.’ ‘I could never really trust someone who didn’t hate his home town.’ ‘Everyone gets far too het up about inter-generational sex these days.’ One child, in Alan Titchmarsh mode, muses that ‘in this country’ he can always identify on which particular day summer turns to autumn. Even the bullied class nerd is fantastically self-assured and delivers an end-of-days prophecy with all the polished eloquence of the Unabomber. Elsewhere the script brims with the casual snobbery of the bored upper-class fascist. Stockport people are ‘ugly and thick’. In Cambridge everyone is ‘rich and stupid’. The urban poor dress badly, have nasty dogs and they never travel, except to Spain, and even then they hate it. All these burnished, long-pondered bigotries don’t belong in the playground but in the yacht club or at the 19th hole. Their only adolescent quality is a certain heartlessness and self-regard.
Sure enough the execution scene is heavy with pulpit jabber too. Imagine Neil Kinnock giving an interview while shooting clay pigeons. The weapon itself is frighteningly realistic and the actor casually aims the barrel towards the audience, quite reckless of the traumatic memories this gesture will stir in those who’ve been involved in real shootings. It’s a revealing blunder. Stephens doesn’t know what a firearm is. Guns are props, spurs to debate, instruments of amusement and entertainment. They’re toys. And he waves them around to get a reaction just like the kiddie gangstas who pose with their sawn-offs on Facebook. This is a silly, exploitative, unenlightening and unimaginative play crammed with cheap-thrill, look-at-me shock tactics. It’s also quite tedious. The young cast are excellent, particularly Henry Lloyd Hughes as the arch-bully. Designer Paul Wills has created a sumptuously beautiful set based on a geometrical projection of antique bookcases soaring into the flies. A lovely flower on a bed of ugly horrors.
Judgment Day by Ödön von Horváth is a courageous act of artistic reclamation. Written in 1937, this seldom-performed play is plotted with enormous panache. It opens with a moment of sublime mundanity at a railway station where Anna, a bored flirt, tries to provoke the handsome stationmaster, Thomas, by kissing him while his shrewish wife watches from an upstairs window. The kiss kills dozens of people. Distracted by Anna’s peachy lips, Thomas forgets to work the signal box and an express train hurtles to its destruction. At Thomas’s trial Anna lies and testifies that he changed the signal correctly. His wife tells the truth but Thomas is acquitted. The village welcomes him home as a hero and hounds his wronged wife into exile. Guilt haunts him and further blood is spilt. Very neatly the play captures the petty intensities of village life and the sadistic caprice of providence. Sounds good. Why isn’t it revived more often? It’s quite cumbersome to stage and the problems it throws up are solved here with some marvellous visual effects. Every detail of the production brims with class. I admired it a lot. I just didn’t like it much. Simple reason. The characters are all ghastly people. Anna, a brainless home-wrecker; Thomas, a duty-bound drudge; wife, a frigid and frustrated bitch. Not one deed in the play is performed for honourable motives. I can’t remember seeing such a compelling piece of theatre come down with such a punctured bump at the end. This is a wonderful group effort and a real tribute to the translator, Christopher Hampton, a lifelong fan of von Horváth. Yet I left with a horrid sense of futility.
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