Origin of Species
Arcola
Seize the Day
Tricycle
Oh, not again. Yup, I’m afraid so. I had no wish to return to the vexed topic of Darwinism but a much-praised show in east London tempted me out on a frosty night to the Arcola theatre.
Bryony Lavery’s new play has a storyline that’s as nutty as a Christmas cake in Broadmoor.
Molly, an archaeologist working in Africa, smuggles the skeleton of a female hominid back to her home in the Yorkshire Dales. The unearthed Neanderthal springs to life and Molly proceeds to school her in the amazing truths of evolution. The characters in this bizarre educational farce are symbolic rather than human and the show is more a dramatised lecture than a play.
In the lead role Marjorie Yates gives Molly plenty of warmth and authority, while Clare Hope-Ashitey is startlingly talented and superglamorous as the awakened Neanderthal. Sheathed in a Spandex jumpsuit, she learns English with amazing rapidity and articulates it in a sumptuous Rada accent, even though she’s been raised on the Yorkshire moors. Those hominids were more advanced than we thought.
The play’s chief purpose is to feminise Darwinism. Molly gets very cross indeed when she reads textbooks that credit ‘Man’ with discovering fire, pioneering agriculture, creating walled cities and inventing the wheel which in the fullness of time would blossom into the congestion zone. Those naughty old books should admit that women had a part in ‘Man’s’ discoveries. OK, Ms Lavery, but remember that ‘Man’ in this context is a noun of common gender taking a singular form but having a plural sense. It just means ‘humans’.
Perhaps there was no need to write a play to correct this misapprehension. But the survey of Darwinism’s chequered history discloses fascinating details. From the start, the theory has had some pretty strange advocates. And I don’t just mean eugenicists. Molly quotes a learned paper written by an upper-class Parisian scientist who was enormously satisfied with Darwinism because it proved that the highest form of life was the upper-class Parisian scientist. Even more gratifyingly, it proved that the wife of the upper-class Parisian scientist was on the same level as a gorilla. This sheds revealing light on the nature of the theory. Its advocates assure us that Darwinism is a series of causally linked propositions leading to an inevitable and objective conclusion. It isn’t. It’s a piece of plasticine. You can shape it and shift it and flatten it and mould it and use it to lend authority to whatever prejudice you happen to support. Right now it’s being deployed to keep loony Christians away from the blackboard. As for its objective value, well, that’s a rather subjective matter. Some say it contains unchallengeable truths. Others say the same thing about the Koran.
Over at the Tricycle, Kwame Kwei-Armah’s new play asks if a black man could ever become London’s mayor. It all sounds a bit familiar. Kwei-Armah’s career began with three disparate works examining the condition of black people in Britain. He gave this trio the ominous label ‘triptych’ as if the plays were some altarpiece in the National Gallery. Now he’s moved on. Freed from the obligation to write the all-embracing Afro–Caribbean masterwork, he’s created a crisp, funny, shrewd political potboiler set among the opinion-forming élite with whom he now happily hobnobs.
Jeremy, a young black journalist, becomes an overnight celebrity when he’s filmed wading into a gang of knife-wielding thugs. Determined to use his fame for the greater good, he stands for mayor in the hope of offering dispossessed kids a decent role model. Put like that, the plot still sounds pretty dreary but Kwei-Armah is a fleet-footed and perceptive satirist and his analysis of racial politics is acute and sometimes perfectly shocking.
The campaign is headed by a wily back-stage operator Howard Jones, who talks about the black community like an 18th-century plantation owner discussing his slaves. ‘Tell them what to think and they run away and think it.’ Power lies in wooing the whites, so Howard pursues that goal with ruthless cunning. Not every step in this overelaborate story is convincing but the general trajectory makes a satisfying curve. Jeremy learns that mingling altruism, race and power is a doomed enterprise. Power will always trump every other consideration. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith is dependably brilliant as Jeremy and Karl Collins is hilarious as the slippery Howard, who begins as an all-conquering press manipulator and ends up pleading with Jeremy to save him from hostile investigators. Collins is a seriously starry comic turn and Kwei-Armah, as director, has turned in a stylish, uncluttered production. This brisk and passionate play is the best thing he’s written yet.
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