No surprises, but you’ll enjoy it
The second play this week takes us to The Old Vic and The Constituent by Joe Penhall.
A three hander with three stereotypes – Anna Maxwell Martin as a newly by-elected MP; James Corden as an ex-squaddie (Afghanistan) and Zachary Hart as a reasonably embittered DC.
The MP is compassionate, the ex-squaddie damaged and the DC everything you might expect from a Metropolitan policeman, if you were a cynic.
Penhall writes as someone who doesn’t think much of 21st Century Britain, and I suspect would have been happier if the play had finished its run before, rather than after, the general election. As asides it’s all a bit ‘bloody Tories’ agit-prop, without mentioning a party.
The play is well, if predictably, scripted – it starts with good jokes and turns of phrase, which continue, as do the jokes, though, as you might expect, it gets darker. The issues it points – the tragedy of PTSD damaged soldiers, of toxic social media, of aggression against MPs (and particularly women MPs) of the impossibility of a balanced constituency role nowadays and of fairly toxic policing are hardly novel.
But the play works if it is well acted, and it is so in spades.
Maxwell Martin is consistently excellent in what she does, and Corden shows that he still knows the lot about stage acting – particularly in the last, quite touching, scene. Hart allows the toxicity of his DC (who starts more as a figure of fun) to build slowly so that a climax, when it comes, still surprises.
Overall this play works (even as agit-prop) and the standing audience at our performance ‘curtain’ confirms that.
It’s not a great play, but that doesn’t matter.