Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Tom Cruise deserves our support and pity

These are your lives.
Yard Theatre, until 4 October

Tom Cruise. That’s the big offer from a newish venue, the Yard Theatre, lurking on the fringes of Hackney Wick. The 80-seat space is located in an upwardly mobile sprawl of discarded warehouses and asset-stripped factories reinvented as artisan boozers. You can get there by train, cab or bike but the best people arrive by canoe. They tether their fibreglass tubs beside the Olympic Stadium and stroll along the canal overlooked by the knotted weirdness of the AcelorMittal Orbit which resembles a giant treble clef made of bubble gum. Inside, the venue is sensibly arranged in a horse-shoe configuration. The stage is roomy but intimate. The seating has been reclaimed from all kinds of sources: closed schools, bankrupt cinemas, torched cars, crashed airliners. I found myself on a cushioned banquette from an arcade video game.

The poster promises enticing goodies. ‘A verbatim script courtesy of Tom Cruise’ and ‘re-interpreted iconic film scenes’. Curtain up and we’re watching an English chat-show with an English host quizzing an English actor. I had a feeling Tom Cruise came from overseas. Our man on the witness stand is evidently not the chiselled proprietor of the Mission Impossible franchise but a bug-eyed cockney with round shoulders and a needy grin.

So it’s an allegory not a drama-doc. The script is intelligent and offers an artful analysis of celebrity’s downside, the tedium, the isolation, the repetition. The sense of opulent captivity in a millionaire’s sweatshop. The star spends all day giving identikit answers to identikit questions.

‘It’s a great time in my life … I just want to work with the people I want to work with … You can work with someone and love someone and know it’s not right for you.’

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