Be Near Me
Donmar
Complicit
Old Vic
Here’s the odd thing about the Donmar, the country’s pre-eminent theatrical power-house. Its productions are nearly always stunning and rarely (very rarely) atrocious. They don’t do so-so. But here we have it, an OK sort of show done with tremendous affection and commitment but with numerous elementary flaws. Be Near Me, adapted by Ian McDiarmid from the novel by Andrew O’Hagan, passes the first test of art. It has integrity and sincerity. Everyone involved in the production clearly gave it their best shot. So what’s wrong? Well, the storyline advances with all the pace and vigour of a snail having a heart attack.
The main character, a pompous Catholic priest posted to a remote Scottish parish, seems calculated to inspire our absolute contempt. A classic Oxford saddo, the posturing cleric quotes Tennyson in a needling descant, recites French aphorisms and uses his appreciation of Chopin and fine wine to demonstrate his intellectual superiority over his bovine, not to mention ovine, flock. Here he is tasting a Chablis with his house-keeper. ‘Poor washer-woman that you are, the Scottish education system has left barely a mark on you.’
After an hour, something happens. The priest becomes pals with a hard-drinking 15-year-old lout from his special needs class. What? Friends? A thick-as-two-planks, alcoholic, teenage Celtic fan and a snobbish, Balliol-educated, Proust-quoting, English wine bore? Yeah, always mates those types. The boy isn’t even gay. Their absurd misalliance ends when the priest offers the youngster a half-hearted, and instantly forgiven, kiss. Next thing we know the lout has grassed and filed a complaint for sexual assault. How come? Paternal influence, we’re told. But we’ve also been briefed extensively on the detestation which the young man harbours for his father, a dim-witted unemployed, burger-gobbling layabout. Indeed it’s his dislike of this immobile slug that provides the only evidence we have that the youngster has any functioning mental capacity at all.
The priest is put on trial and at last the play achieves some momentum and dramatic interest but once the verdict is delivered it meanders cosily back into its comfort zone of soft-focus Caledonian whimsy. My advice — buy the novel. It’s loads cheaper, it won’t trap you in a theatre for 150 long, long minutes, and if you hate it you can just feed it to the goat.
The Old Vic’s new production, a worthy political treatise by American writer Joe Sutton, feels woefully out of date. Ben, an idealistic left-wing journalist faces jail for refusing to reveal a terrorist source. His sleek worldly lawyer, Roger, fights desperately to extricate him from the charges but his efforts are compromised by a rogue column written by Ben in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, in which he heatedly demanded vengeance on the Muslim world. This lapse has damaged his integrity and left the campaign isolated. That’s about it. There’s a wife in there somewhere and between them the three characters plough through various free speech vs. national security issues. David Suchet’s silky performance as Roger is effortless, if unremarkable, and Elizabeth McGovern gives the under-written role of the wife as much passion and depth as she can manage.
But what a disappointment. First, the Old Vic has been beaten up and bandaged back together again in a new configuration that allows plays to be presented in the round. I’ve been told by several directors that ‘the Vic’ is the best designed theatre they’ve ever worked in. Kevin Spacey’s improvements have turned it into a banal group-therapy circle over which the soaring splendours of the proscenium arch glare angrily. Second, this is a campaigning play whose numerous references to the soon-to-be-closed Guantanamo feel like yesterday’s news. It must have been some time last year that Spacey decided to mount this slice of propaganda to coincide with the new President’s inauguration. Fascinating! The pro-Democrat Spacey evidently calculated — and was perhaps even hoping, in a commercial sense — that the burbling granddad and his rifle-toting pin-up girl would claim the White House. Finally, it’s a shame that Richard Dreyfuss, an excellent light comedian who made his name playing loveably shambolic anti-heroes, has saddled himself with the role of Ben, a vain, chippy, shouty, needy and utterly humourless liberal martyr whose histrionics teeter permanently on the verge of self-pitying tears. The rumour that Dreyfuss had trouble mastering his part (forgiveable enough with lines as unmemorable as these) is confirmed by the sight of a peanut-sized ear-piece obtruding from his left lug-hole. Funny thing is, if they’d done the play on the proper Old Vic stage no one would have seen it.
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