Good shot!
Performances alone make Stephen Sondheim’s scarifyingly dark attack on US gun culture a production to remember
MICHAEL MOFFATT SHOW OF THE WEEK
Assassins
Gate Theatre
The programme for Assassins shows a grim face painted with the US flag, symbolising the nasty underbelly of American patriotism and the American dream. Stephen Sondheim’s 1990 show is a scarifying attack on the deadly availability of guns in the US, but it’s constructed as an elaborate piece of black comedy, witty, funny and macabre. Great for fictional murder as in Sweeney Todd, but running the possible risk of seeming to trivialise actual political murder.
The show is inspired by the strange crew of nine loners who, over the past 150 years, have either tried to or succeeded in shooting an American president, from John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Lincoln in 1865, to John Hinckley’s attempt to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Their motives stretch from poverty, disillusionment, lofty ideals, and messianic certainty to sexual obsession, all ultimately driven by the lure of making a mark on history. But the weapon is always consistent and available.
The stories are not told in a straight narrative form, all the killers being seen and dissected either individually or together throughout the show. The Lee Harvey Oswald scene is a particularly chilling psychological episode.
The setting is a grotesque fairground rifle range with a notice inviting you to kill a president and win a prize. A HIT light signals success; a MISS light flashes for failure. The Proprietor is selling these misfits an inverted American dream; achieve immortality and solve your problems with a gun. ‘Dream girl unimpressed? Show her you’re the best/if you can shoot a president./ All you gotta do is crook your little finger and shoot.’
It’s all done with typically sharp Sondheim cynicism and wit, using a range of different musical styles from fairground, country and western, to gospel (I Am Going to The Lordy), and the love ballad sung by Reagan’s attacker as a plea to Jodie Foster. The theme song is the fiendishly ironic, Everybody’s Got a Right/Got a Dream.
The lack of a narrative structure, and having to regularly return to the individual characters is one of the weaknesses of the show. The same message gets hammered home relentlessly if stylishly, and even Selina Cartmell’s exhaustively inventive direction can’t prevent it flagging at times.
There are stand-out performances from Matthew Seadon-Young as Wilkes Booth and Mark O’Regan as the narcissistic, religion-driven Charles Guiteau, killer of James Garfield, while Kate Gilmore and Sarah Jane Moore do a comedy double act as the incompetent would-be assassins of Gerald Ford. Indeed on performances alone, this is a memorable production. (And a minor programme note – Jerome Kern, not Richard Rodgers, composed Showboat.)