This codswallop’s a National disgrace!
POINTLESS swearing, oldeworlde speak, lesbianism, incest, colour and genderblind casting, pagan fertility rites, ooh-arhh accents, an incomprehensible plot and a mechanised, talking crow: is Common the worst show yet staged at the Royal National Theatre?
The 19th-century theft of open pastures — the Inclosure Acts — is a historic scandal full of dramatic potential. The subject could be topical, showing a parliamentary elite pushing its weight around, depriving the populus.
You can see why the National’s artistic supremo Rufus Norris might have been initially drawn to playwright DC Moore’s idea. But as soon as he read Moore’s muddled, cod-verse script, rotten Rufus should have dropped it in the WPB. Instead, risibly, unless you are one of the poor actors involved, it has been given the main stage at our country’s leading subsidised theatre for ten weeks.
Anne-Marie Duff plays a character who may be called Mary. She arrives in an undefined English village circa 1800. Is she from London? Is she from another age? Blow me if I could work that out.
Miss Duff ’ s half- hearted delivery of orotund lines left me baffled. She could have been reading the small print in an insurance policy. An adolescent farmhand, Eggy Tom (Lois Chimimba), speaks like a 21st- century yoof, complete with ‘innits?’.
She takes a message from mysterious Mary to her sister Laura (Cush Jumbo). Laura is busy burying animals. Was that a dead Shetland pony she was dragging across the stage? Or was it the qualitycontrol officer in the National’s new-drama department? We have our first C-word in roughly the second minute of dialogue. Mary shrugs and tells the National’s genteel audience: ‘If my language you offends, fist-f*** you all.’
Laura is surprised to hear from Mary, since she thought her long dead. This is not the only resurrection.
ThE
second half starts with Mary clambering out of a grave — a hand piercing a slit in the stage’s covering of soil. Schlock horror time. The village’s farm folk are first seen with pagan headgear — one man with a wheatsheaf on his bonce, though it may have been a Jedward hairdo.
he turns out to be Mary’s incestuous brother (John Dagleish) and ends up having his entrails cut from his chest.
Out they come, glurrrtchhhh, a string of chipolatas splattered in ketchup. This provoked titters of mirth from an audience that melted away somewhat in the interval. Word has it that, some nights, the rate of attrition is as high as a third as patrons leg it for the exits at half-time.
Mary’s relationship with her siblings takes up more of the plot than the controversy over the village’s common being enclosed by a syphilitic landowner (Tim McMullan, who needs, please, to become more discerning in the parts he accepts).
Trevor Fox, as the squire’s henchman, does his Geordie routine again and fires a rifle a couple of times. That at least woke me up. Other actors sound like something from The Archers.
What were the arguments for and against the Inclosures Act? The play does not offer an opinion. What is the historical context? We get none. What are the consequences (eg, Industrial Revolution urbanisation, higher crop yields, economic enslavement)? Nope. None of that, either.
Common is a pseudish, muffled dud from start to dreary end. Suitable only for connoisseurs of stage disasters.