Where are we?
Lloyd Evans
Tinderbox Bush The Year of Magical Thinking Lyttelton
If you aren’t sure what to make of the present, try shoving it into the future. This trusted device is employed by Lucy Kirkwood (who writes for Channel 4’s admired show Skins), in her first stage play, Tinderbox. We’re in a nightmarish England, seared by Saharan heat, shrunk by global warming and torn apart by gang warfare. Cockney Saul has moved from drowned London to hilly Bradford where he runs a meat delivery business with his sweet cowed wife Vanessa and their new Scots apprentice Perchik. Gosh, it’s hard to follow this muddled, mapless future. We don’t even know what year we’re in. Instead the script uses valuable time telling us what to think of Saul. He’s a bully, an ex-pimp, a sexist, an Essex boy, a British patriot and he calls his shop his Empire. Mmm, I wonder what he could stand for. And his children are named Maggie and Enoch. OK, we get it.
Meanwhile, the plot noses its way upward through soggy crusts of detail, through floods and wars and mass-migrations, through the rumoured death of Saul’s former apprentice and the mysterious disposal of his body. Finally, like an exhausted mole, the storyline emerges. Will Vanessa run away with Perchik? A boring old love triangle, in other words, which renders all the dystopian artifice redundant and necrotic, but the author keeps returning to it, perhaps from a sense of loyalty. After two hours of drama we’re suddenly told, ‘Cornwall’s gone.’ Submerged, we assume, in the mounting seas. But no, it’s been bought. Bought? How? By whom? The Americans and the Chinese, apparently. But what for? Illogicalities like this are cyanide to the play’s credibility.
The good news is that the show features the voluptuous comic mermaid Sheridan Smith, (the blonde one from Two Pints of Lager), a beauty who can tame or rouse an audience with the merest dipping of an eyebrow or the curling of a lip. Another treat is designer Lucy Osborne’s butcher’s shop which exudes earthy pride and judicious practicality. The once-lovely tiles are made lovelier by their coat of grime; a stout meat-hook juts perkily from the wall; the chopping board is equipped with a demure line of well-worn knives stoically waiting to be worn a little more. These choices are made skilfully, attentively, pleasingly, and with a degree of respect for the show’s intentions that the script simply doesn’t deserve. One assumes that zeitgeist plays are popular with fringe directors because they promise depth, significance and durability. A well-constructed dystopia (or ‘disutopia’, as the Bush boldly calls it) can crystalise a moment in the development of human affairs. But a bad one merely provides lazy writers with an excuse to create imaginary caricatures in the ever-pliable future rather than discovering real ones in the more resilient present. If I were given 20 seconds in charge of the Bush (or the Arts Council, which famously supports it) I’d enshrine a new commandment: ‘Forget the zeitgeist.’ To entertain an audience is to do plenty and, as this show proves, even that is bloody difficult.
At the Lyttelton Vanessa Redgrave has created a monumental portrait of grief in The Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion’s bereavement memoir sold stackloads in America but did less well over here. It starts abruptly one evening in 2003 when the novelist’s husband drops dead in front of her. She’s plunged into instant denial followed by months of mental turmoil which takes her to the brink of madness. Her husband was a celebrated screenwriter and when the LA Times phoned asking her to confirm his death she hesitated. ‘LA is hours behind New York. Maybe he isn’t dead there yet.’ Her daughter, by a ghoulish coincidence, was also in hospital having fallen into a toxic coma. Didion ordered the TV in her room to be turned off lest she wake to the bad news about her dad. Returning a day later she found the television’s mute screen plastered with a notice: ‘Father dead. No TV.’ The monologue is at times hard to engage with because it requires an intricate knowledge of America. You have to guess, for example, what NRP is and only when you learn that its breakfast show is called ‘Morning Becomes Eclectic’ do you realise it’s a cross between Woman’s Hour and Poetry Please. And Didion’s reverence for her own experience becomes a touch stifling. One longs for a dash of healthy cynicism. A British author faced with bereavement doesn’t say, ‘How will I get through this?’ but ‘How many words will I get out of it?’
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