Enter Rufus Norris. The new National Theatre boss is perfectly on-message with this debut effort by Caryl Churchill. Her 1976 play about inequality screams, ‘Vote Ed’ at triple-klaxon volume. Not that anyone in the audience was won over. They’d made up their minds long ago. Which is just as well because the play is hopelessly ineffective on every level. Churchill must be the most over-rated writer the English theatre has produced. She has virtually no dramatic skills. She can knock out humourless preachy rhetoric by the yard but as for the rest of it she hasn’t a clue. She can’t write a plot. She can’t create a human individual or differentiate one character from another with quirks of thought, word or deed. Wit, comedy, spectacle, suspense and revelation are all but unknown to her. It’s hard to trace any connection between one part of the script and another. All her scenes are shapeless prolix creatures. Each is dropped on to an empty stage from nowhere and it crawls forwards, rather than developing, with groups of samey-sounding chatterboxes taking it in turns to recite gobbets of oratory in support of one or other left-wing view. She seems reluctant, in this play at least, to give her political foes any kind of platform.
The setting is the English Civil War and the Putney Debates that formed the basis of today’s parliamentary conventions. Tricky stuff to dramatise because the material is so static and wordy, and the issues are rather abstruse, but Churchill regards these problems as virtues to be emphasised rather than vices to be diminished. It feels like a tepid debate in a village hall run by chippy Marxists. The characters kept talking about ‘pot pourri’ until I realised they meant ‘popery’.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in