Gripped by paranoia
Lloyd Evans
2,000 Feet Away Bush Relocated Royal Court The Chalk Garden Donmar
America is nuts about paedophiles. That’s the take-home message of Anthony Weigh’s new play 2,000 Feet Away, which stars Joseph Fiennes. The title refers to a provision of Megan’s law which sets out the minimum permissible distance between the home of a paedophile and any place where children are likely to gather. The law has unintended consequences. A town can completely rid itself of sex offenders if enough inhabitants register their houses as children’s nurseries. The sex offenders are evicted and, deprived of any loyalty to a world they can never rejoin, they congregate in shoddy hotels where they help each other develop ruses to
Shining_122x125 Arts:Mise en page approach children while evading detection.
Naturally a building full of nonces becomes a rather tempting target for vigilantes who want to lob petrol bombs. This is the grisly inferno the play examines. Everyone hovers close to nervous collapse. Middle America is portrayed as a quasi-medieval society gripped by paranoia and peopled by insular brooding burger-chomping dimwits who hug their demons close in order to preserve what remains of their sanity.
Joseph Fiennes plays a troubled, wellmeaning deputy charged with the task of chaperoning a homeless sex offender around the state. As often when filmstars appear in the theatre, the wrong things strike you. His height for a start. The camera makes Fiennes darkly mesmerising but on stage he just seems a bit short and even faintly ordinary. The hair is thinning, the waistline is doing the opposite, and his skull is so narrow that one wonders if he was caught in infancy in the closing doors of a lift. The role is a good match for Fiennes’s speciality, the tortured loner, but he’s a hard character to warm to and the script doesn’t take him on a rewarding emotional journey. Same for the whole cast. Everyone suffers, nobody learns and the play is hobbled by its unwillingness to subject the issue to the thing it really demands, intelligent analysis. It ought to be an eye-opener, instead it’s a wrist-opener.
But it’s far more entertaining than Anthony Neilson’s new play at the
20/05/0 14:43 Page
Royal Court which uses our fear of child abduction as the centrepiece for a Gothic fantasy. Neilson has a big fat box of theatrical tricks and, as usual, he carries his characters to the murky rift between reality and illusion, between identity and misidentity. His plays have a sheen of subtlety that beguiles only the unsubtle. True, there are a couple of genuinely unsettling moments in this play but they’re marred by the writer’s fondness for bad puns, silly acronyms and puerile gestures. At one point a comedy German sex-pervert strokes the hair of a little girl and whispers, ‘Hef no fear. I vill protect you.’ Neilson is the James Dyson of theatre. His creations are full of novelty and nifty design, there are vast capacities of hot air swirling around and, at the centre, a vacuum. Neilson has nothing of interest to say about anything. That’s a fault no artist can correct.
At the Donmar the triumphant stewardship of Michael Grandage continues with another outstanding show. One of the productions of the year. On the face of it The Chalk Garden looks like a safe-as-houses drawing-room comedy. Dotty pensioner Mrs St Maugham has engaged a new nanny, Miss Madrigal, to care for her disturbed teenage granddaughter, Laurel. The confused and sulky youngster treats Miss Madrigal to an aggressive cross-examination which she fends off with a brilliant combination of wit and psychological insight. Everyone in this play is bonkers and adorable. The footman Maitland is a deranged conscientious objector who keeps trying and failing to hand in his notice. Penelope Wilton gives a lovely performance as the eccentric nanny with a macabre secret. Margaret Tyzack is a peppery delight as Mrs St Maugham, a poetic old matron who sounds like the missing link between Lady Bracknell and Hyacinth Bucket. Attempting to rouse the sick butler from his locked bedroom she consoles herself with, ‘One is never at one’s best through mahogany.’ Clifford Rose bumbles charmingly as the elderly judge. Complimented on his sprightly looks he observes, ‘Judges don’t age. Time decorates them.’ The script is crammed with nuggets of lyrical wit and every detail of Grandage’s production is presented with such faultless assurance that one wonders how this play ever fell into neglect. It’s a shame the Donmar isn’t bigger but I notice that Dickens Unplugged has just fused the lights at the Comedy. This show would brighten up that dark theatre beautifully.
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