THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
54 years ago, Richard Eyre had a play, an adaptation of a novel, The Ha Ha, at the Hampstead. It was his first and it kickstarted his career, although he soon switched to directing, which is how we’ve come to know and admire him. He’s been a distinguished (now ex) director of the National Theatre with a luminous list of credits in theater, TV, film and opera as well as being an erudite author and commentator.
Now Sir Richard he’s back at Hampstead for his first original play, but sadly it is not up to the level of his directing skills. It aims for Chekhov territory, with its focus on an unhappy family picking at each other, but in the end it veers more toward Shaw with his moral lessons where the long preface ends up being more important than the plot. You can’t blame Eyre for this, we do live in “interesting times” and what with Brexit, climate change and a global pandemic there’s an awful lot to squabble over across the generations. He has a go at them all here, but it all tends to crowd out any real dramatic pulse.
The greatly under-rated Vincent Franklin plays Sir Neil Marriot, a distinguished pediatrician who had a ‘good pandemic’, becoming familiar to millions on TV as a government medical advisor, which has earned him a knighthood. He’s rewarding himself therefore with a formal birthday dinner for his admirers, where the family have been summoned. It all takes place in the oak paneled room of his son’s posh school (perfectly realized by Tim Hatley). There’s something familiar however about the catering manager on duty that evening.
She’s Florence (Amanda Bright) a dutiful, religious, middle-aged Black woman who we later learn has done time and has a painful connection with Sir Neil. Aiding her is a bright young man Habeeb (Raphel Famotibe) and a raucous young Irish girl, Wynona (Megan McDonnell), a wanabee singer who blares out country songs while they set up for dinner.
Then the family appear. There’s Val (Eva Pope) the solid Northern wife who is mother to Hugo (Patrick Walshe McBride) a sparkly gay Tory with an acid tongue who is a Special Adviser to the Education Minister. Then there’s daughter Sarah; Grace Hogg-Robinson is wonderfully poignant as this grating 18-year-old Extinction Rebellion activist who is either wallowing in virtuousness when she’s not bathing in self-pity but, all the time, desperately unhappy. Will she make a scene?
Eyre who has always been politically engaged and a great wordsmith does fashion some choice lines for this lot and the cast do wonders to elevate them, but the piece is just too schematic to ever take off. Too often the characters feel like ciphers for political arguments. And while the single set and use of real time anchor the piece, it does set up a whole lot of problems for a writer. How do you contrive to get this group of characters to meet in a way that is realistic even if they wander in from the party ‘off’. Even Eyre’s polished skills at staging can’t get past the clunkiness of the script at times.
Would these people even see the caterers, never mind engage them in personal conversation? Wouldn’t that obnoxiously rude Irish girl be fired on the spot for verbally assaulting the main client?
We discover that Florence was a mother wrongly accused in a “shaken baby” case and prosecuted and jailed on the back of Sir Neil’s expert witness evidence, subsequently proven flawed. She grabs her chance to confront him while he cannot acknowledge his failings. Val senses the two were past lovers and in another implausibility we learn she observed the trial. Why?
Also thrown into the mix, and just to lend some nobility to Neil, is a story about his efforts to save Romanian kids from the horror of Ceausescu’s orphanages. The kernel of the play is his relationship with Sarah and her struggles growing up in the shadow of a big man who demands too much and isn’t seeing what he’s doing, but sadly it all comes too late in the day to rescue this rather leaden piece.
