An angry rant, but a Fiennes return to action
Beat The Devil (Bridge Theatre, London) Verdict: Public house polemic ★★★☆☆
AT THE Bridge Theatre, on London’s South Bank, Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter (also known as Ralph Fiennes) is taking on the devil of Covid-19 in a new monologue by 73-year-old Leftist playwright Sir David Hare.
The show details Hare’s descent into the underworld of coronavirus back in March. And with Hollywood casting and such a titanic title, I was expecting one hell of a 50 minutes.
But to be honest, we’ve already heard some of it on Radio 4 — and as a complete piece it might even (whisper it) be a contender for Book At Bedtime.
Hare starts by telling us how his earliest symptom wasn’t so much losing his sense of taste as discovering that everything ‘tasted like sewage’.
He then fills us in on the night sweats causing him to wake in a lake of perspiration. And the chills, which his wife tries to vanquish with full frontal body contact. She, incidentally, is sculptor and ex-fashion designer Nicole Farhi, but this was still a little too much colour for me!
In line with Hare’s career as an anti-establishment author, Beat The Devil is freighted with stats about the virus’s horrible impact on the poor and ethnic minorities, as well as predictable pot shots at Boris Johnson and President Trump. He is particularly keen to lament Covid killing off younger ‘better’ people — although statistics indicate his pity should run the other way.
But what really gets Hare’s goat is Government incompetence. Where there should be contrition, he laments, there is ‘bull **** ’, though much of his excoriation can be heard down any pub. It is, of course, terrific to return to live performance and for that I am grateful. But theatre mustn’t be allowed to go the way of The Archers: wall-towall monologues.
I even found the Bridge’s social distancing arrangements more interesting than Nicholas Hytner’s staging. It feels like a Sovietstyle social experiment, with phased entry times, temperature checks carried out by a hidden ceiling scanner and an auditorium that looks like it’s had two-thirds of its seats nicked.
Fiennes catches Hare’s wry, urbane, passionate tone with consummate ease. Yet Sir David seems bewildered by today’s political landscape, which fails to conform to his expectations of decency, fairness and reason.
It feels like an epitaph to his 50 years as a radical writer, trying to set the world to rights.