Joy of joys. Huge, fat, inebriating doses of adulation have been squirted all over Josie Rourke’s first show as the châtelaine of the Donmar Warehouse. It’s a breakthrough production in many ways. You have to break through the treacly tides of critical approval. Then you have to break through the Donmar’s overenthusiastic heating system, which sends unwary play-goers to sleep long before their bedtimes. Finally you have to break through the script — The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar, one of those neglected classics that everyone agrees is marvellous and no one bothers to read. Hardly surprising. We’re in Herefordshire in 1706. The Duke of Marlborough is abroad fighting the French while squads of army martinets scour the English countryside duping bumpkins into joining the service. One of the con men, the philandering Captain Plume, is betrothed to a gorgeous heiress who disguises herself as a soldier in order to spy on him.
Plots like this, of course, require one to suspend, throttle or otherwise detain one’s disbelief for a couple of hours. But my incredulity is too stubborn a beast to be shunted off and told to keep quiet. It keeps pointing out awkward things. Plume, a professional swindler, is the last person to be fooled by a drag act that wouldn’t convince a simpleton with a guide dog. And, rather strangely, the heiress-disguised-as-a-soldier (Nancy Carroll) has left out one crucial detail: the disguised-as-a-soldier bit. She strides around like a catwalk model with her blonde tresses, peachy complexion and curvy figure in plain view. Gosh, it’s hard work. You have to keep persuading yourself to stop noticing blatant absurdities. Imagine going to church because you enjoy pretending to believe in God.
Some bits are all right. Mark Gatiss is quite good playing a tedious fop who minces up and down making Pseud’s Corner claims about his bravery and sexual prowess. The second act has a great five-minute scene in which the army officers, disguised as fortune-tellers, embarrass various posh characters by making them believe in daft predictions. Mackenzie Crook adds some genuine comic brilliance here but only by departing from the script. The dialogue alone isn’t strong enough to yield much humour. The other cast members, perhaps inspired by Crook’s masterclass, have decided to tart up their performances with funny accents and distorted gestures. Uh-oh. Doing something silly isn’t the same as doing something amusing, even though it may feel that way to the person doing it.
Josie Rourke’s direction brims with pious self-confidence. On arrival the public are greeted by a minstrel troupe playing rum-titty-um-tum tunes on lutes and violins. Too bad if you’re not in rum-titty-um-tum mood, I’m afraid. This lot are going to inflict merriment on you anyway. Throughout the play, spare cast members hang around on stage and recline in poses of artful languor like background figures in Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’. Unemployed actors should be kept in the dressing-room with their crossword puzzles. Lucy Osborne’s design is bizarre. The age of Marlborough’s continental wars is evoked by paintings of swirly skies decorated with hundreds of multicoloured candles. The Donmar looks like a squat on Hallowe’en or a Tunbridge Wells craft shop dolled up for Christmas.
A single flop hardly matters in the wider scheme of things. But by humouring Rourke with excessive praise for this creaky piece of retro rubbish, the critics are making things much harder for her in the long run.
At the Riverside, a show which sheds light on a shameful act of neocolonialism. In the late 1960s, Britain and America conspired to deport the population of Diego Garcia, a desert island in the Indian Ocean, and replace their lovely little villages with a runway. Adrian Jackson, directing his own very fidgety script, takes ages getting to the point. He keeps mucking about with video clips, cartoon inserts and other botherations. The tale should be epic and gripping but he can’t find a simple way to tell it.
Our point of entry is a chap called Prosper, a dim black orphan brought up by Rastas in south London, who believes his parents are from Diego Garcia. Poor old Prosper is such a narky, self-pitying boor that it’s hard to give a stuff whether he finds his roots or not. Offered internet access at a library he improvises this magnificent piece of paranoia. ‘The internet watches you back. It’s all recorded.’ Elsewhere Jackson spoils the narrative with prejudiced, flimsy characterisation. The Brits and Yanks are portrayed as devious snickering schemers. The Diego Garcians are pure-minded peasants with a song in their hearts and a happy smile for everyone they meet. The show feels more like an anthropological seminar than a piece of theatre. If you want to spend three hours deciding against a career with a UN refugee agency, here’s your chance.
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