THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Sam Holcroft
Trafalgar Theatre, 14 Whitehall, London SW1A 2DY, until April 20, 2024
Nominated for Best New Play at the Evening Standard Awards this transfer from the Almeida Theatre is a gripping, mischievous, crowd-pleaser with a corker of a central performance by the great Jonny Lee Miller.
He plays Čelik, a Ministry of Culture apparatchik in a totalitarian state and Tanya Reynolds (Netflix's Sex Education) plays his assistant Mei. Or do they?
This isn't so much A Mirror as A Hall Of Mirrors and the fun for the audience is trying to figure out what exactly is going on. There's isn't much I can reveal plot-wise that wouldn't ruin it, so I won't.
The play explores grand themes of censorship, authorship, free speech, and art as a form of resistance in a surveillance state, and it does it by playing with identities and false realities in a way that recalls Pirandello. Jeremy Herrin's fluid staging makes all the transitions between the various plays within a play work, and he even goes 'immersive' at times. We arrive as if to a wedding to find an 'Order of Service' on our seats and later we're asked to stand and deliver an Oath of Allegiance. The performance(s) are interrupted by raids.
Samuel Adewunmi is wonderfully perplexed as Adem, a neophyte playwright who is hauled in because the first play he's submitted for a licence is considered too close to the bone. He says the dialogue is what he's heard through thin walls of his apartment building. Miller's response is that art shouldn't tell us what is, but rather what should be.
Miller, a famously very physical actor, gives Čelik an overbearing energy which is engaging. Shaven headed and stary-eyed he is at one minute scarily ruthless and pompous, the next boyishly fragile or even romantic. His sparring partner is Bax, lustily performed by Geoffrey Streatfield, a jaded hack writer who's taken the Government's shilling, and the piece deftly explores the personal and emotional cost of both options for the artist.
If that sounds dry and self-important, the play is anything but. Holcroft's ingeniously multi layered story, and Herrin's energetic direction of it, give it real momentum over its 2 hour, no interval, running time. Max Jones' set and costumes and Azusa Ono's lighting are perfectly spare.
Tanya Reynolds lends the stiff young civil servant, Mei, an awkwardly comic air which is very funny, but it serves to unbalance the piece in the end. At one stage we watch them all enact a surreptitious play within a play but here there is no sense of jeopardy that at any moment guards might kick the door down and they'd all be carted off to the gulag. Instead, it appears as if it's a jolly party game. This unevenness in the writing never really resolves itself.
