Wasted journey
Lloyd Evans
Free Outgoing Royal Court Fanshen 295 Regent St Frozen Riverside
The Royal Court’s search for new scripts has gone global. Its tireless talent scouts, assisted by the British Council, fan out across France, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Syria and Mexico laying on seminars, workshops and ‘residencies’. They go to India, too, although quite why the Court spends energy nurturing dramatists in a country with the world’s largest film industry isn’t entirely clear. Good Indian writers don’t need foreign aid. Bad ones don’t deserve it.
Free Outgoing by Anupama Chandrasekhar is a harmless slice of Chaucerian parody which has arrived in Sloane Square from Madras. Like a migrant with the wrong papers, it hid in the Theatre Upstairs for a few months before descending on to the main stage with indefinite leave to remain. It’s a daft and threadbare tale, which shows the southern city of Chennai as a parochial creek seething with Victorian prudishness.
When naughty teenager Deepa appears on the internet entangled semi-naked with her boyfriend, moral hysteria grips the community. Deepa’s snobbish divorced mum and her shouty needy brother do their best to deal with the infamy. The plot behaves like a tourist. It doesn’t go anywhere interesting and it takes ages to get there. The most interesting character, Deepa, is left on the sidelines while the others are as predictable as sunset at night-time. There’s the fretful mum, the seismic teenager, the prissy neighbour, the frowning teacher etc.
This underdeveloped piece of whimsy feels like the first draft of a TV comedy drama and because it’s so firmly rooted in India it has nothing to say to Londoners and will only connect with ex-pats from the subcontinent. So the Court has discovered an amazingly complex and laborious way of providing homesick non-doms with a twohour reminder of the life they’ve chosen to leave.
Mind you, it must be marvellous fun for their talent scouts touring the world, developing scripts, attending read-throughs and tempting playwrights with the offer of a London opening. Next they’re off to Cuba. Spot the mistake? The best drama gets here anyway and the worst should be left where it is.
Theatre Delicatessen has done a deal with the devil. Usually luvvies shun capitalists but Delicatessen has teamed up with an office developer in a scheme that enables the troupe to visit undead buildings and mount plays in their scooped-out innards prior to refurbishment. Wonderful plan. The derelict interior of 295 Regent Street makes a suitably ravaged setting for Fanshen, a David Hare play located in rural China in the 1940s, in which everyone wears clogs and rags and lives on two beanshoots a year.
The harrowing script focuses on the awakening of the peasants’ political consciousness and traces the pathology of the revolution from the first heady and virulent outbursts of freedom, through the bitter struggles for influence and dominion, to the corrupt and paranoid backlash of the counter-revolution. The play premièred in 1975 and in those days playwrights were expected to tuck a Big Message, like a Christmas shilling, into their theatrical cake. And here it is: communism may look glamorous but it’s dangerous, too, so if the glorious revolution starts in your factory think first before burning your overalls, snapping the conveyor belt in two, singing the ‘Internationale’ and shooting the foreman. That seems a bit obvious today (and it wasn’t exactly news in 1975), but the play is a still a valuable and clearheaded piece of social history. Frances Loy’s fine production is full of energetic performances and it finishes with a splendid visual flourish. A tough but rewarding night out.
Frozen by Bryony Lavery is a genre-crossing play that works despite its untidy construction. The subject matter is universal. Why do child-killers do it? Nancy, a mother, grieves for her murdered daughter. Agnetha, a psychologist, believes the killer’s conduct is ‘not a sin but a symptom’. In a fascinating lecture she outlines the theory that psychopathic murderers are made, not begotten, and that injuries to the front of the head can turn anyone into a killer.
The mismatch between lecture and drama scarcely matters, and the production is distinguished by excellent performances. Jack James is eerily good as the lonely childsnatcher whose tattoos are the best friend he ever had. And Dorothy Lawrence, as the bereft mother, refrains from emptying bucketloads of brine over the stalls. There’s nothing like a cascade of hot tears to leave an audience cold. Instead of stage grief, with its extrovert and simplistic luxuries, she leads us into a portrait of true mourning, a humble, quiet and inscrutable web of feeling.
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