Brave and brilliant Duff toils in vain as the tedium level is raised to critical
The advance word on this has been terrible: bored, irritated, confused punters leaving at the interval, taking to online forums to complain, one preview cancelled, the running-time frantically slashed.
A right stinker at the National? So DC Moore’s Common indeed proves – though I think it’s a more honourable failure than some of the more irate reactions suggest. The 37-year-old playwright boldly bids to plough a liberty-taking furrow across a dramatically neglected historical landscape: early 19th-century rural England, a period of accelerating industrialisation and resistance to land enclosures.
The opening augurs well: ominous drum-beats and pot-bangings fill the air as a horde of rustics, faces obscured by animal-masks and assorted flora, trudge into a menacing circle. Their “leader” – head sheathed in wicker – sets fire, defiantly, to some fencing. Intriguing!
Then, lights up, and on to the expanse of patchy soil that strews the stage comes Anne-marie Duff ’s Mary – imposing in scarlet gown and tricorn hat – and here the problems begin.
The land may be suffering cropfailure but the language used is fantastically over-ripe. No one (including director Jeremy Herrin) seems to have told the author that less would be more: he goes indulgently to town with a riddle-me-this, James Joycean-playful babble.
Introducing herself as a female rogue, slippery as hell, Mary explains she has conned a predatory London aristo, procuring “papermoney to any-atone and from such acorn-coins I stand here – a cityforest rogue-woman oak”. Yes, there’s two and a half hours of this – some of it entertainingly inventive, peppered for rough and tumble measure with expletives, much of it raising tedium levels to critical.
Duff brilliantly stands her ground – does her damnedest to draw you into the mystery of this revenant who’s back to lay Sapphic claim to her sisterthrough-upbringing Laura (a chronically underused Cush Jumbo) – the latter living, borderline incestuously, with her rebel-leading brother (John Dagleish). But to what ends is our anti-heroine manipulating others’ superstitions with her suspect acts of clairvoyance? Is she after halting the enclosures, and doing good, or blighting the land, siding with the dark forces of progress?
Come the second half, when Mary rises from a grave and chats to a talking crow, while around her the menace spills into visceral violence, the plotting achieves Steven Moffat levels of head-scratching opacity. I found it near-impossible to see the wood for the trees. What a shame, then. What a waste. Avoid.