Revelatory Richie

Theatre: Lone Star & Pvt. Wars, King’s Head; We The People, Globe; All About My Mother, Old Vic

The King’s Head has a deserved hit on its hands with a James McLure double bill about soldiers haunted by Vietnam. Emasculation is the linking theme and the scripts dance nimbly between the opposing poles of pathos and high comedy. James Jagger (handsome boy, highly watchable, famous dad) has a very promising line in wry comedy. But the real revelation here, to me at least, is Shane Richie, whom I last saw hosting game shows on telly. I thought that’s all he did. But what an actor. His two performances are expertly differentiated from one other. First, he’s Roy, a strutting peacock of a veteran whose life implodes when he learns that his wife has seduced his brother. After the interval he plays Silvio, a darker, richer, funnier, sadder role, a war invalid who compulsively exposes himself to nurses. Richie is an actor of amazing range and depth and he has that unteachable knack of reaching straight for the audience’s nervous fibres. Having seen him shine in these exceptional tragicomedies I doubt if there’s a stage role he couldn’t succeed in.

At the Globe, another American play. We The People examines the four-month-long convention which in 1787 produced the American constitution. Constitutions are fascinating documents and their creation can certainly be dramatic. What it cannot be is theatrical. You’d need a Thucydides to turn these clotted lumps of discussion and negotiation into literary art. Instead, we have Eric Schlosser, a journalist and grudge-monger, who’s more interested in the founding fathers’ reluctance to abolish slavery than in their bold experiments in nation-building. The story lacks a decent plot or a central personality and this ambitious, turgid production is wastefully lavish: three dozen characters, rifle fights, live cannon fire, costly and fetching costumes and even George Washington’s white charger trotting in from the wings with its owner on board.