Dazed and confused
Lloyd Evans
The Tempest Arts, and touring Brendan at the Chelsea Riverside A Mother Speaks Hackney Empire
Tara Arts, a troupe devoted to ‘crosscultural theatre’, are hauling their Tempest around the country. In a minivan by the look of things. The whole production — cast, cossies and props — could easily squeeze into a Bedford Rascal but, as Mark Rylance has already demonstrated, thrift and The Tempest don’t mix well. Rylance bored the Globe to a standstill doing this play with three actors. Tara sport six and it’s still not enough for the sprawling and fantastical storyline. You’ve got two sets of castaways on different bits of an atoll (three, if you include Prospero and Miranda) and a pair of magical sprites buzzing around like lost milk floats. Confusing enough if it’s your sixth view of The Tempest. Indecipherable if it’s your first.
I was surrounded (yet again, are they following me?) by a host of teeming schoolkids. Actually they behaved better than most teenagers, and though everyone was texting and talking no one was stabbed. The cast just about managed to keep them diverted but kids have a merciless eye for pretension and when Ariel came mincing on waggling a blue plastic bird they howled with contempt. Best thing on view, the stylish Islamic costumes. The acting seemed passable, the set perfunctory. Scrimping on props is as unwise as scrimping on actors. When swords are drawn, and no swords appear, the result just looks bonkers. Same goes for the ‘director’s vision’ in the programme notes where Jatinda Verma likens Prospero to ‘Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s right-hand man’. If that’s vision Milton was an astronaut. Tara Arts and their rickety Rascal may pitch up in your area. Give them some petrol money and a friendly adieu.
Tube trains swift as turtles ensured that I arrived six minutes late for Brendan at the Chelsea. The theatre staff — ‘your inconvenience is our delight’ — put on a heroic show of obstructiveness and made me miss the entire first half. Damn! The second half was a wonderful thing, a brilliant, subtle and unflinchingly truthful portrait of a complex and difficult subject.
There’s a lot to dislike about Brendan Behan. A crude, smug, boorish, egoistical womaniser who drowned his talent in brandy and whose reputation nowadays seems to rest on a threadbare odd-box of antique gags. ‘The only tobacco you’ll get in here is Three Nuns,’ says a screw to the young Behan in Borstal Boy. ‘None today, none tomorrow and none the day after.’ Adrian Dunbar, complete with a prosthetic beer gut, recreates the flesh-andblood Behan. The talker, the charmer, the wag, the idler. The man is mesmerising and instantly adorable. His voice alone deserves an essay. Dunbar’s Behan speaks in a rich, deep, clotted, slurring, heavily aspirated Dublin accent full of rhetorical flourishes and pulpit percussion. He talks, talks, talks, and everything he says is thoughful, lyrical and chockful of wit. Even his sharpest barbs are impish rather than poisonous. His wife tracks him down and when she refuses to give him a divorce, he turns on the derision. ‘You’re a walking reproach ... If you were married to Jesus Christ he’d be back up on that cross in five minutes, banging the nails in himself.’ Strange that this outstanding show was so poorly attended. Wrong venue, perhaps. I’d see it again, all of it, any time. For several days afterwards, my brain kept tricking me into thinking I’d spent the weekend in Ireland.
A Mother Speaks is an exceptionally articulate monologue about gun crime. The plot needs no explanation and most of the script is about the boy’s childhood. Because it’s performed in real time, not in flashback, the mood is unexpectedly uplifting and celebratory. And you never know when he’s going to die so his murder comes as a complete and horrible surprise. The emotional charge is massive.
Judd Batchelor, writer and performer, is an exceptional talent, equally at home playing comedy and tragedy, and the play ends with a profoundly shocking twist. Instead of wringing our hands, she suggests, let’s wring some necks. But rebuilding the gallows won’t help. Examining our responsibilities may. The fact is guns titillate everyone, from the editor of the Daily Telegraph down to the pimply crackhead in a shell suit. And a diabolical glamour surrounds illegal firearms because they make authority surrender to frenzies of helplessness. Screaming headlines, top cops in a tizzy, Downing Street summits, perplexed columns in the Guardian, papal pronouncements by Kwame Kwei Armah, even plays at the Hackney Empire. These things remind a kid how powerful he’ll become once he has a piece down his pants. Our panic is working for the arms dealers.
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