Fathers Inside
Soho
Too True to be Good
Finborough
Oh, great. It’s one of those. Fathers Inside is a workshop-based outreach project directed by an actor/facilitator. Those last nine words encircle my heart like the clammy fingers of death. But the play is a surprise and offers a big, warm, manly handshake. It starts quietly. Seven young convicts on a drama course are getting to know each other. The atmosphere is steeped in hostility and male aggression. The dialogue feels ragged, conversational, obvious, boring even. And it’s not so much under-rehearsed as unrehearsed. This is deliberate. Life is unrehearsed, and this play’s amazing air of naturalism gradually sidelines your doubts and beguiles you into believing the actors are real people. They reveal themselves slowly, warily. Aswan is an angry black Cockney runt. Damian is a lanky, laid-back Jamaican dude. Olu is a braggart Nigerian lothario with absolutely no personal morality. These sound like clichés. There’s nothing wrong with that. Bad writing fears stereotypes and good writing embraces them because the germ of familiarity is necessary to engage our interest in a character. By day, the rehearsal room simmers with murderous resentments. By night, locked in their adjoining cells, the men shout sexually-charged insults at each other — taunts they wouldn’t dare utter in the rehearsal space for fear of physical retaliation. Paradoxically, curtailment frees them and freedom curtails them. The evolving storyline compels this mob of confused and angry rejects to absorb the bitter truth that even though they’ve been tossed on the scrapheap they still have duties to their children and to themselves. Swallowing that pill is their only chance of mastering their destinies. Responsibility is another name for hope. Written by Philip Osment and directed by Jim Pope, the play emerged from detailed research into the lives of real prisoners. Its tang of authenticity and its uplifting message will impress themselves very powerfully on the minds of our banged-up youths. It could, and should, play in every jail in the land. Those criminals are in for a treat. As for law-abiding theatre-goers, well, you really may have to kill for a ticket.
Shaw’s play Too True to be Good comes with a health warning: ‘seldom revived’. The plot is farcical, almost surreal. Two crooks rob a mansion. The lady of the house, stirred by the burglars from a debilitating stupor, decides to accompany them on a criminal tour of the world. This set-up is just about credible but the characters test our disbelief to breaking point. The criminal mastermind Aubrey is far too close to Shaw. An ordained priest, Aubrey has turned to burglary, arguing that theft is a less discreditable activity than bombing civilians from the air, an occupation which won him praise during the Great War. Preaching is his divine vocation and he regularly interrupts the action to deliver a new consignment of mellifluous bombast. He is Shaw unbounded, unedited, unleashed. And he’s not the only one. Halfway through act two, some old boy in an undertaker’s costume wheels on a soapbox and makes a platform speech attacking scientific determinism and declaring, with predictable Shavian ingenuity, that he’s a lapsed atheist who has lost his faith in godlessness. These characters are not flesh-and-blood creatures but fleeting impressions of dew on the silvery web of Shaw’s sophistry. And by constantly introducing lengthy sermons Shaw wrecks the audience’s trust in proceedings. Imagine a referee halting the cup final and doing five minutes of stand-up. The entire play feels like a country-house fandangle, a bauble written for the amusement of intellectuals who share the author’s moral prejudices and his unfamiliarity with dirty fingernails. He chortlingly insists that authority is a joke, law is a mirage, prestige is self-deceit, medicine is fraud, wealth is mental illness and true spiritual nobility cannot exist outside the heart of the honest, toiling labourer. Only a moneybags like Shaw, who prudently married an heiress, could project these preposterous romances on to the brutal facts of industrialised society. But despite his glibness, his addiction to facile paradox, Shaw can always amuse. Our judicial system, he says, is based on the assumption that ‘if you set two liars to expose each other, the truth will emerge’. When a general is swindled he reacts nonchalantly. ‘You mistook this great military genius for a halfwit?’ ‘Naturally,’ says the general, ‘the symptoms are precisely the same.’ I warmly recommend this show simply because second-rate Shaw is often better than first-rate anything else. Alex Blake’s Aubrey is a model of svelte rhetorical charm. And the production is very skilfully accommodated into a space barely half the size of the ticket-hall at nearby Earls Court station.
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