Pakistan. Big problem. Burning issue. Put it on stage so we can find out how we got here. J.T. Rogers’s new play opens in 1981 just after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. A young CIA officer, with the exotic and suggestive name of Jim, sets off for the badlands of Waziristan to offer his support to anyone in a headscarf who wants to kill anyone with a red star on his helmet. He strikes up a mutually exploitative relationship with some mountain-dwelling shepherds. He’ll give them military hardware, they’ll give him information (much of it unreliable). Choppers for whoppers.
If this sounds crushingly predictable, then don’t slash your wrists just yet because there’s a joke coming. Here it is. The uncouth Muslim rustics love The Eagles. Which is funny, in a way, but it’s OK if you didn’t laugh as the joke keeps popping up again and again. Apparently, gags get funnier the more they’re told to the same audience.
Everything in this play is static, wordy, unnatural and mechanical. It’s like a dramatisation of a downloaded thesis created with Microsoft’s ‘Thesis Dramatiser’ programme available exclusively to NT playwrights who write about burning issues. I doubt if Lloyd Owen had to reach far to find the inner corpse he brings to the role of Jim. Or maybe his work-to-rule performance is a sardonic verdict on the playwright’s powers of characterisation.
Owen deserves better, as does Matthew Marsh, a wonderfully subtle and menacing stage presence reduced here to playing a pantomime Russian who calls everyone comrade and doesn’t use the definite article. The clichés keep coming. The Pakistani generals are sleazy windbags, the Muslim tribesmen are medieval jobsworths (‘wife give daughter, worth less than dust’), and the Brits are represented by an excitable toff who’s overfond of whisky. As this yawn-a-minute, all-male folly grinds towards an inconclusion the stage is crowded out by a flock of extras. The National likes to jazz up weak plays by trundling on a dozen Equity spares in the final act. They’re not cheap. Each one hikes the budget by three grand or so, but the NT’s patrons are limitlessly wealthy so no one bothers about little things like money.
The Old Vic has rebounded from a lacklustre summer with a dazzling production of Design for Living. The homocentric programme notes tell us that the play’s chief interest lies in its encrypted account of a gay affair between Otto and Leo, two globetrotting Bohemians entangled with a melancholic beauty named Gilda. The tiny minority of theatre-goers who aren’t gay may want to know there’s more meat in the pie.
Coward’s play addresses the peculiar disappointments of success, the misplaced nostalgia felt by renowned artists for their years of struggle, and the tragic fact that celebrity propels one into the company of billionaire halfwits. Kurt Cobain, who found success a prison he had to shoot his way out of, would have appreciated this strange and sometimes extraordinarily wrathful play.
Anthony Page’s production takes a while to work its magic and the opening act lacks strong gags and looks a bit scruffy. Things aren’t helped by the casting. The lovely Gilda has ditched Otto and taken up with Leo so he needs to be played by an actor more alluring, physically and romantically, than the man he replaces. But he ain’t. Andrew Scott, as Leo, specialises in camp, highly strung Irishmen so it’s a stretch for him to reach the right note of languorous suavity. He tends to scowl, even when smiling, and his voice cracks when he raises the volume. A backstairs bitterness sometimes enters his manner, which mars the play’s tone of lightweight merriment.
These faults are dramatically heightened by Tom Burke’s effortlessly sophisticated Otto, who isn’t Coward-esque or Coward-ish but quite simply the finished article. No affectations or extra flourishes here, no pretences, no run-ups, no taking aim, just the rounded musical charm of Coward rising from within. Whenever he’s on stage the audience needs no convincing, and his presence throughout the second half is largely responsible for the show’s success.
The last act, set in New York, is a triumph of design and performance and even Andrew Scott discovers the right blend of mockery and elegance. Otto and Leo arrive at Gilda’s over-decorated penthouse to claim her back from the superwealthy superbores she’s fallen in with. Their zinging dialogue is a bizarre parody of cocktail chitchat underpinned by an intense loathing of upper-middle class values. Nothing in Look Back in Anger is quite as venomous as this cunningly concealed assault. Coward, who was famously ousted by the angry young men, was clearly angrier than all of them.
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