Cuban cliché

I had quite high expectations when the curtain went up on The President of an Empty Room. The writer, Steven Knight, produced the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Dirty Pretty Things and the director, Howard Davies, was responsible for Mourning Becomes Electra, one of my favourite productions of 2003. Nor was I the only one who thought this sounded like a winning combination. The press night audience included Derek Jacobi, Imelda Staunton and Stephen Sondheim.

My first impression of the play seemed to confirm this optimism. The designer, Bunny Christie, has ingeniously managed to convert the Cottesloe into a Cuban cigar factory, and the atmospheric lighting design by Mark Henderson underlines the audience’s sense of being in a claustrophobic sweatbox, with sunlight streaming in through half-shuttered windows. The scene is set for an epic confrontation.

Ten minutes in, and I was still hopeful. Admittedly, the hot-tempered cigar-rollers hadn’t yet quarrelled about anything more significant than whether to play music or listen to poetry on the factory’s public-address system, but this seemed like a bit of unobjectionable throat-clearing on the playwright’s part. Any moment now, I thought, someone is going to uncover evidence that there’s a communist informer in their ranks and it’s all going to kick off in a wonderfully melodramatic style.

Forty-five minutes later, when the workers were still squabbling about what to listen to, it began to dawn on me that The President of an Empty Room was never going to take flight. By now, every cliché about Cuba had been faithfully wheeled out, including the prevalence of commercial sex, the excellence of the country’s health service and the willingness of so many Cubans to risk a perilous sea voyage to start a new life in America — and I began to doubt whether I’d get through the rest of the evening without several banana daiquiris.