Arms control
Lloyd Evans
Landscape with Weapon Cottesloe Wake Up and Smell the Coffee New End, Hampstead Blame Arcola
Questions are easy, answers less so. That’s the conclusion of Joe Penhall’s new morality play and it won’t come as a surprise to anyone brighter than a hedgehog. A brilliant but unstable missile scientist has invented a gizmo that will give Britain military superiority for a generation. Professor Brainiac then suffers an attack of conscience and announces that he wants personal control of the export licences. (Does that sound likely? On stage it seems so loaded with improbabilities that it’s hard to see the play over the top of the pile.) Prof. B. is worried that his gizmo may fall into the hands of nutcase states like (who else?) the US and Israel. Instead he suggests handing the innovation to the European Union. Hmmm. Imagine the EU trying to fire a new weapon. By the time the two-million-word feasibility study had been translated into 67 languages our enemies would have built the thing from scratch and it’d be on its way to vaporise Strasbourg. Enter Prof. B.’s manageress who tries to charm him into changing his mind. When she fails, a creepy spy slithers in and starts making coded threats. You can probably guess what happens next.
No one is stretched very much by this static and discursive affair. Tom Hollander is perfectly effective (but no more) as the troubled inventor who seems far too smart, too clued-up on international relations, to be capable of imagining that the MoD would let him dictate its proliferation policy. Jason Watkins, as a squeaky-clean MI6 thug, issues his ultimatums with a sprightly chattiness that’s original and quite scary. Best of all is Pippa Haywood, in a clingyswingy trousersuit, who strides around puffing and swearing as Prof. B.’s exasperated line manager. But there’s a truckload of chat in this play and the actors (especially the likeable Julian Rhind-Tutt) try to compensate with nervy hand gestures. But flailing arms are no substitute for action and spectacle, and the failings of this play are epitomised by its silly title, which makes it sound like a still life. Too much stillness and not enough life.
The wonderful Helen Lederer stars in Greg Freeman’s new play Wake Up and Smell the Coffee. With her blazing eyes and Hovercraft boobs, Lederer has always seemed too riotous and exuberant for telly. Even the stage can barely contain her. She could probably conduct the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games single-handed. Here she plays an exotic sexual adventuress, with a history of cannibalism, who’s determined to seduce a narcoleptic who keeps nodding off on the sofa. Rooted in reality? Not a chance. This slender, absurd and finely acted show is a highly enjoyable piece of escapism.
It couldn’t be further from Blame, by Judith Jones and Bea Campbell. Odd playwrights, these two. They fuse drama with real-life testimony, and though their method sounds horribly earnest it works very well. The personal confessions don’t hold the drama back but add texture and colour at the right moments. The setting is a Hackney crack-den and all the characters, bar a ten-year-old girl, are complete and utter scumbags. There’s the illiterate jailbird mother, her thick pregnant daughter, her drug-dealing boyfriend, his Jamaican aunt who’s also done time for importing cocaine, and a needy pervert who drops in occasionally to deliver buckets of deep-fried swineflesh. What a crew of charmers. And they entertain themselves by playing non-stop dance music so loud that it even penetrates the soundproof walls of Hackney’s Noise Pollution Department.
This is hell. Yet there’s a touch of humanity here and the characters gradually become sympathetic and even likeable. The aunt, whom I first dismissed as a dimwitted drug-mule, has a truly harrowing story. As a teenager desperate to flee Jamaica she was advised by a ‘friend’ to visit a certain address. The house looked OK so she knocked on the door. Four men welcomed her in. Having raped her they threatened to kill her if she didn’t export a bag of coke to England inside her intestine. Arriving at Heathrow, pregnant by one of her rapists, she gave herself up, hoping for mercy. She got eight years in Holloway and emerged addicted to heroin. Told like that, her story transforms one’s reaction from a swipe of contempt to a pang of despair. Not many plays have that effect. If the script is a little shapeless and inconclusive that’s no criticism. Life’s like that. Nor does it deal in solutions or answers but in the random, crushing, pointless horror of some people’s lives. That’s its strength.
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