Counted?
County Hall, until 22 May
The Real Thing
Old Vic, until 5 June
Voting is so irrational as to qualify as an act of religious devotion. The process involves a fabulous confluence of approximations. Candidates offer a pattern of promises. Voters select the pattern that most closely meets their needs. And though there may be only the barest overlap between the needs and the promises, the voters maintain a belief that their choice carries influence even after it’s been diluted in the choices of millions of others. It’s a miracle anyone votes at all. A new verbatim play, Counted?, examines our attitudes towards the process.
Scrupulously researched, superbly acted, and staged in the austere grandeur of County Hall’s debating chamber, this is a terrific slice of entertainment. The material has been recorded by unobtrusive radio mikes and the result is far more authentic than a TV documentary and its fly-on-the-wall approach. Bulky cameras falsify matters by thespianising the experiment and turning the participants into actors who simulate larger-than-life versions of themselves. Radio operates by stealth and this eavesdropped world is crammed with unintended hilarity.
The best clown of the lot is Simon Poland, who gives a brilliant account of the over-earnest politics professor in charge of the investigation. He steps bravely beyond the walls of his faculty to encounter The People of Britain, and his blinkered pomposity is a joy to behold. He assumes that non-academics are as thick as carp. Instead of asking people about their voting habits he says, ‘What do you think is happening here?’ and waggles a photo of a polling booth at them. He tries to descend to the level of a teenage girl by suggesting that treats be offered at polling stations. She looks bemused. ‘Vote for the winner,’ he chirps, ‘and you get a cake?’ Embarrassed pity stares back at him.
What the professor uncovers is not just the bracing intelligence of his interviewees but also their unpredictable complexity. A hearty Yorkshire lady happily describes her golfing club as ‘a haven of fascism’ and, equally cheerfully, admits to reading the Guardian. An angry old man who supports the BNP turns out to be married to a Swedish Iraqi. The show’s stars are a family on a housing estate who keep a goat. The father takes the animal with him to the bank in order to unsettle the staff and secure brisker service. His daughter claims the goat hates her. ‘No, no, no,’ Dad demurs, ‘it’s not hate; it detects a weakness in you and exploits it.’ The show’s ultimate value lies not in the quality of its research but in its portrayal of quirky, unedited lives. Here it’s priceless.
Just down the lane, the Old Vic’s revival of The Real Thing is an out-and-out triumph. This is Tom Stoppard’s Private Lives, a searching and caustic portrait of the writer as a melancholy intellectual titan. The play’s layered structure suggests that romantic love is a form of theatre and every lover is a method actor improvising as he goes along. There are passages of breathtaking eloquence here, of quite perfect dramatic oratory.
Henry, a fêted playwright, likens the power of words to the sprung dynamics of a cricket bat. What appears to be a bit of flat stick is an instrument capable of carrying a ball ‘two hundred yards in four seconds’. His girlfriend’s political beliefs draw him into the anti-nuclear movement and he gets lumbered with the task of rewriting a turgid political TV drama. ‘The script is half as long as Das Kapital and only twice as funny.’ It’s fascinating to recall that the TV play, at its zenith, was assumed to be a form of punishment, not entertainment.
Toby Stephens, who plays the lead, has sometimes caused me to worry that family connections have overpromoted him. (His mum is Maggie Smith.) Your influential pals can launch your career but they won’t sustain it and this role shows Stephens at his absolute finest. It helps that the elements complement him well. Stoppard is the best-looking man in every room he enters and Stephens doesn’t have to imagine that. As for being the most intelligent and most gifted man in every room, well, Stephens acts that with enormous conviction. The jokes come to him easily and he also captures the pathos and loneliness of the overgifted superman.
Pain is never far from this play and Stephens’s statuesque face betrays in exquisite detail the full force of his suffering when he discovers his lover’s infidelity. Opposite him, Hattie Morahan is funny, sexy, witty, coltishly athletic and wonderfully convincing as Henry’s erratic girlfriend. Anna Mackmin directs with a crisp appreciation of the show’s range of virtues: wit, poetry, truth and dramatic sincerity. The perfect antidote to Cleggmania.
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