You’d get more drama from a night in A&E
Keeley Hawes is the main draw in this NHS saga, but...
The Human Body (Donmar Warehouse, London)
Verdict: Commendable but dull ★★✩✩✩ Nachtland (Young Vic, London) Verdict: Nazi parlour game ★★★✩✩
MY FAITH in the NHS is very great indeed. But it was not, alas, great enough to survive Lucy Kirkwood’s new play starring Keeley Hawes (she of The Durrells on TV) and Jack Davenport (he of Pirates Of The Caribbean on film).
The story is set in the early days of the NHS after World War II, with Hawes playing Iris, a Labour Party activist who’s also a country doctor, and a mum married to a wounded war veteran (who’s a GP too).
Perhaps because a political homily on the NHS won’t detain even a Guardianreading loyalist after the interval, Kirkwood adds to this mix a Brief Encounter-type love story. This features Davenport as George — an English Hollywood film star who’s back home to look after his mother.
Hawes has a role I wouldn’t wish on anyone: a wholesome, hard-working crusader of the sort we all need saving from. Yet we must also believe that she has a wild, Anna Karenina streak and is capable of abandoning hubby, daughter, career, politics and all, for dapper George.
Unable to leave his wife (à la Jane Eyre), Davenport’s George is stiffer than a flagpole atop a Norman church. He harbours few thoughts of his own, but has memorised a political diatribe by Charlie Chaplin, as well as some poetry by A.E. Housman. All very historically accurate, but does he also need to address his beloved
Iris as if he was enjoying a good cigar in a gentleman’s club?
Iris’s beleaguered husband, meanwhile, is a Tory who, with his war wounds, is straight out of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and unable to perform in the sack.
Luckily for Tom Goodman-Hill in that role, he has a number of other parts... including a chatty ticket inspector, a haughty waiter and a louche Pathe newscaster.
Conspiracy-theory yokels who distrust central government and the NHS are represented by George’s mother (a pleasingly batty Siobhan Redmond). But they’re all on Iris’s messianic to-do list. The upshot is a worthy, Westminster-bubble chicklit saga of the sort Keir Starmer might approve, if he were a script consultant.
Director Michael Longhurst has slowed the action down to a three-hour crawl. There are some good lines, including the mad mother’s cry of ‘That’s put a ferret up your knickers!’. But you’ll see more drama at A&E over the same time... for free.
■ WHAT would you do if you found a painting by Adolf Hitler in the attic? A) Burn it. B) Sell it. C) Hang it on the wall.
It’s the sort of parlour game that passes for serious drama these days.
And while there is fun to be had in the Young Vic’s Nachtland, I don’t normally turn to Hitler for light relief.
The title is a made-up German word meaning, literally, ‘Night Land’, and is a portent of the end of civilisation.
The play is a social satire by Marius von Mayenburg about a family who discover their late father owned a Hitler watercolour. Eager to exploit its value as Nazi memorabilia, they concoct a provenance in which their opera singer grandmother was a lover of the Fuhrer’s private secretary, Martin Bormann.
The painting is at first deplored by the sister (Dorothea Myer-Bennett, replacing Romola Garai, who dropped out of rehearsals).
But then her brother (John Heffernan) wins her over with his glee at the piece’s potential value. In the midst of it all, his Jewish wife (Jenna Augen) discovers that her heirloom engagement ring was actually given to grandma by Bormann.
There is black comedy with the sister’s husband (Gunnar Cauthery) locked in a Nazi salute after cutting himself on the picture.
Most amusingly, a Mephistophelean buyer (Angus Wright) makes a surreal entrance in bondage underpants,
dancing to Iggy Pop. There’s also a neat turn from Jane Horrocks as an untrustworthy art dealer.
The real theme is, of course, the persistence of anti-Semitism and there is a roll- call of high-falutin culprits including Chaucer, Wagner, Chopin, Dickens and Oscar Wilde. It’s meant to make us think. But of what?
The resurgence of fascism in Europe looks a lot less rarefied to me.