The Constituent is a larky show about violence against female politicians. A strange subject for a comedy. Anna Maxwell Martin plays a vapid but well-meaning MP, Monica, who receives unwelcome attention from a sinister dropout, named Alec (played by James Corden).
Alec’s backstory is quite a puzzle. He used to work as an MI6 spymaster in Afghanistan, where he persuaded senior Taliban commanders to operate as double agents. While off-duty he seduced an NHS ward sister who happened to be nursing soldiers on the battlefield in Kandahar.
If you want a celebration of spineless masculinity, look no further
That, at least, is the story he gives Monica. Alec says he married the nurse but they split up after having kids. Then he started job-hunting. Instead of pursuing a career as a senior intelligence officer, he started installing burglar alarms. This is how he meets Monica: he’s fixing the electronics in her constituency office.
While he’s there, he asks her to help with his divorce case but she turns him down because MPs can’t get involved in court proceedings. He moans and bleats about his mental health. Millions of men are in the same boat, he says, and he begs her to take up the issue in the Commons. This is fascinating. Alec believes that his personal problems can be solved by an act of parliament. A great many activists seem to suffer from the same delusion.
Monica’s refusal makes him furious and he returns to her office with a box of bullets and a threat: she might as well be dead, he declares. She telephones for help and the Home Office sends her a bungling cop who likes to eat bananas on duty. He encourages her to overpower Alec by learning jiu-jitsu. ‘End it before it starts,’ he says. ‘Show no mercy.’ This advice is supposed to be comic, obviously, but it feels forced and rather weird.
The script’s non sequiturs mount up. Monica stays in touch with Alec even though he has a history of hassling women and is addicted to antipsychotic drugs. When the windows of her office are smashed in by a burglar, she’s treated disdainfully by her party colleagues. They even threaten to deselect her. Come off it: vulnerable MPs are not treated with such cruelty. Why does Monica have no friends or staff at her constituency office? It’s just her and Alec. And there’s no romantic frisson between them to give their meetings a psychological motive.
The show’s writer, Joe Penhall, draws Monica’s character with little care or love. She is given the brains of a gnat and the personality of a vending machine, and her willingness to indulge Alec’s sob stories is limitless. ‘I believe in compassion,’ she cries. ‘Every man I know is a victim,’ he weeps. Corden does his best to turn this angry misfit into a likeable character but the intractable script defeats him. What a shame to see his outstanding comic gifts wasted on this grindingly miserable show. If you want a celebration of spineless masculinity, look no further.
Next To Normal is a musical about a grieving mother’s inability to cope with her son’s death. It opens as a tribute to suburban contentment with a family of Americans whiling away the hours singing soft-rock ballads at home. Then comes a shock. We learn that the mother, Diana, is a bipolar outpatient whose unresolved grief for her son has developed into a severe case of hallucinogenic psychosis. She has visions of the dead boy as a handsome adult who belts out rock anthems while leaping around the kitchen.
Medics try to cure Diana. They give her happy pills which make her miserable. They pump her with tranquillisers that curdle her mood and turn her angry and violent. Next they try to cheer her up by passing a 240V electric current through her brain. No luck there either.
This episode may be a homage to Pinter’s three-act drama The Caretaker, which exposed the shortcomings of ECT back in 1960. It seems that medicine hasn’t advanced since then. Diana’s doctors discover that by zapping her skull with a bolt of electricity they have accidentally erased her memory. Quite a handy device.
Her husband then has to explain the family’s entire history to her – and to us. They spend the second act flipping through photo albums and yammering about the early days of their marriage. As drama, it’s punishingly dull. And the son’s ghost keeps bursting on to the stage and belting out yet another rock anthem.
The actor who plays him, Jack Wolfe, is a fantastic performer with a voice as sweet and powerful as a thunderstorm in a heatwave, and yet his presence is annoying because he holds up the story. Until he gets exorcised, the show can’t resolve itself.
The creative elements here are impossible to enthuse about: lightweight characters, flimsy music, forgettable costumes. The house they occupy looks like a student flat designed by a bored computer. And yet, the crowd loved it.
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