Not even Ben Wishaw can save this weak and watery production
Theatre Against Almeida
I’m flummoxed by this. One of our finest actors: Ben Whishaw. One of our shrewdest directors: Ian Rickson. One of America’s most interesting playwrights: Christopher Shinn. A pertinent focus: violence in the modern age, and how it might be understood and defused. And a loosely insinuated celebrity angle to boot: the character Whishaw plays, Luke, is a Silicon Valley aerospace billionaire in the Elon Musk mould (the super-rich Tesla entrepreneur who wants us travelling at hyper-speed in tunnels and dreams of colonising Mars). So what on earth has gone wrong?
The near three-hour running time to start with. It’s up there with Hamlet, which Whishaw so memorably played back in 2004 at the Old Vic when barely out of drama school. Yet, while Shakespeare gives us human emotion at its most complex, Shinn has concocted a protagonist with all the depth of a computer printout. In fact, beside this stealthily inquisitive figure, even that geeks’ geek Q (as played by the star in the Bond films) looks super-charged with personality.
Concerned by a mass shooting on a university campus, and convinced that he has been told by God to “Go where there’s violence”, Luke has decided to let his ever-growing empires take care of themselves for a while, and spread his word among the people.
As part of a nation-roving project, he wants to hear from those caught up in the tragedy – get a more profound understanding of these destructive impulses. So his scepticism-encountering itinerary (supervised in tandem with his journo-turned-pa Sheila, cue a spot of love-interest) includes meeting the hick parents of the loner who ran amok, and getting approached in turn by a student who cut his clingy, possibly copycat friend out of his social circle and makes no apology for the latter’s killing spree.
Whishaw, still boyishly handsome at 36, kitted out in T-shirt and jeans, with white socks and sneakers, does a nice line in self-contained gurus (he was last at the Almeida two years ago as a feline, flirty Dionysus). His face here is open, serene, solicitous, his every physical gesture self-aware, cerebrally loaded. Yet neither Whishaw’s mesmeric understatement – nor a momentarily full-on bout of bedroom writhing, as he strips to his undies in the second half – can adequately galvanise this sluggishly presented evening. At points, Shinn tries to broaden the scope of the script, and even introduce a satirical note: a militantly progressive professor chides Luke, and a female creative writing student, for their attempts to carve out a contained area of interest, holding that as violently exclusionary of other groups.
The line “The New York Times wants to interview you about why you privilege the Bible when you reference religious texts” raises a rare laugh at the expense of our politically correct age. But having apparently been inspired initially by Jesus, Shinn has wound up turning the wine of a potent subject into a watery disappointment.
Until Sept 30. Tickets: 020 7359 4404; almeida.co.uk