High ambitions at the Donmar. Artistic supremo Josie Rourke has chosen to direct one of Racine’s more impenetrable dramas, Berenice. The play introduces us to the emperor Titus, a besotted weakling, and his lover, Queen Berenice, an ageing sexpot from Palestine. Berenice wants to become Titus’s official squeeze but the xenophobic Romans don’t care for asylum-seeking adventuresses seducing their rulers. So Titus sends Berenice packing. She’s reluctant to go and she hangs around while her ex-lover, Antiochus, hovers in the wings awaiting developments.
This is the position at the start of the play and, 90 minutes later, not much has happened although a lot of feelings have been discussed in wordy speeches. Racine writes like a corporate lawyer. His characters are good at analysing their emotions and listing their many gradations and shades of colour. But they never surrender to the implacable forces of the heart and the blood. In Racine’s day, audiences were accustomed to a lofty, cool, formalised drama in which emotion was regarded as at best trivial and at worst humiliating. The result is a play about wild, doomed sexual romance in which the lovers address each other like garden-party diplomats exchanging zombie tittle-tattle. The mismatch between subject and style is total.
The performances are decent enough, if a bit perfunctory. So are the costumes. Titus, the ruler of the world, wears a white nightie with a bolt of purple linen tossed over one shoulder. His head is adorned with a regal garland of plastic vine leaves that could do with a clean. Berenice, who has bare feet and Statue of Liberty hair, is togged up in the sort of nice scarlet gown you’d buy from Stella McCartney for £7,999, or from Primark for £7.99. Her spurned boyfriend, Antiochus, wears a belted tunic and a toy sword, like a Tolkien baddie looking for Hobbits to stab.
The star of the show is Lucy Osborne’s effortful and distracting design, full of tricksy beauty and pretentious grace. Before the show begins, slender cascades of dust, like silken pillars, fall from the roof and gather in soft piles on the floor. This is utterly marvellous and quite pointless. The imperial palace is represented by a sandy golf bunker crowded with half-buried spurs of wood. Over this, looms an eye-catching gangway built from Ikea breakfast chairs nailed together.
This insecure flyover is a constant and alarming feature of the play. The actors keep charging up its winding steps (wobble, wobble, wobble) and pausing at the apex (wobble, wobble, wobble) to deliver an important speech (wobble, wobble, wobble) before bustling off again (wobble, wobble, wobble), while the structure threatens to collapse into the dunes beneath. There are three problems with this barmy set-up. First, it wants to be considered as an art work in its own right. (Bad.) Second, it can’t decide if it’s an interior or an exterior. (Terrible.) Third, it gives no information about the era, location or historical context of the drama. (Fatal.) I rather doubt if this show will do much for Racine’s reputation. Mind you, Racine didn’t do much for Racine’s reputation either.
A new play at Waterloo East explores the life of Barack Obama in the days when he was living in a crappy apartment in Harlem. Writer Rashid Razaq depicts Obama as smart, sanctimonious, self-regarding and rather aloof. The storyline is bizarre to say the least. It’s 1985 and Obama is rooming with Sal, an unimaginably stupid Pakistani dopehead, who blows the rent money on drugs and manages to get the pair evicted. (Obama doesn’t notice till it’s too late.)
Sal has a pug dog, Charlie, that he dotes on, but the unlucky pet gets caught in the crossfire when a drug deal goes wrong. Sal tries to rip off a Puerto Rican gangster who takes revenge by seizing Charlie and slicing his tummy to ribbons. The knifed dog, wrapped in Obama’s leather jacket, is carried into the flat where it whimpers gorily on the floor. Sal is too distraught to do anything but have hysterics. So the future president takes control and terminates Charlie’s agony by smothering him with a pillow. Having given this foretaste of Obamacare, the great orator then takes a copy of Moby-Dick and finds one of its less prolix gobbets to read out as a funeral address for the expired pug.
The story ends with a tearful Sal and a firm-jawed Obama going off to bury the mutt in Central Park. Did any of this happen? I expect so. No writer would bother to invent a tale as mawkish and silly as this. Shame really. Obama’s early friendships are a fascinating subject for a play but Razaq has come up with a deeply unappealing threesome: a humourless prig, a whiney embezzler and a bleeding dog.
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