The President’s Holiday
Hampstead
The Sea
Haymarket
The Vertical Hour
Royal Court
There’s no such thing as a great script idea. Ideas are equally good or bad, what counts is how they’re treated. Take the 1991 coup against Gorbachev. Pretty dramatic, momentous and gripping, I’d say. And here’s Penny Gold to dramatise it. She may well be a Russian analyst, an expert on the intricacies of revolutionary politics and a brilliant diviner of the male psyche but she’s decided to give those specialities a rest.
Shunting the whole nasty business of the coup to one side, she focuses on the Gorbachev family cooped up in their Crimean dacha surrounded by KGB plotters. Decent harmless folk, the Gorbachevs, but they’re more like a family facing a Christmas powercut than the leaders of a vast empire threatened by internal revolt. To add depth Gold includes arty interludes suggesting parallels between their house arrest and the massacre of the Tsar’s family. Laughably spurious, not least because the two coups are as different as chalk and Chernobyl. She draws Gorbachev as a pompous saint but it’s Raisa who really seizes her interest. Isla Blair plays her as she’s written, a doughty beaming head girl with misty eyes and a sheen of condescension who steers her posturing cretin of a husband towards sensible decisions. When a KGB guard arrives with a chocolate cake it’s Raisa who stops Gorbie stuffing it down his gob. Yes, that’s the level. Julius Caesar rewritten by one of the Teletubbies.
The Sea, Edward Bond’s 1973 costume drama, is tentatively subtitled ‘a comedy’. It’s funny in parts but it’s also complicated and a bit bonkers. We’re in a Norfolk village in 1907 where the drowning of a young grandee is being blamed on the draper, David Haig, who doubles as the coastguard.
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