Britain needs this astonishing play
Albion Almeida ★★★★★
Allegory seems to be the theatrical flavour of the month. Last week came Saint George and the
Dragon at the National. Now, returning to the scene of his triumph with King Charles III, and riding high on the back of another series of his violently entertaining TV hit Doctor
Foster, Mike Bartlett gives us Albion.
If you can’t guess the thematic terrain from the title, then the set with which director Rupert Goold and designer Miriam Buether greet you as you enter a reconfigured Almeida auditorium should do the trick. The stage has been thrust out to form an island-shaped lawn, with leafy oak at the rear, flower-beds along the sides and compact, encircling brickwork: a verdant fortress.
We don’t hear the “B” word once during the course of three hours but, without question, here’s a drama that, in rooting around issues of belonging, identity and place, and above all our attachment to the past, is steeped in the churned-up, acrimonious soil of post-referendum life.
That might make it sound like the height of unsubtlety, but the genius of the piece is that it contemplates the political by cleaving firmly to the personal. Like some figure out of Chekhov, the formidably brusque new owner of the Oxfordshire house we’re in – Victoria Hamilton’s successful businesswoman Audrey – has sentimental designs on its grounds that may not match fiscal reality. She wants to restore them to their former glory as gardens of remembrance for the First World War dead and thereby provide a resting place for the ashes of her son, killed in one of Blair’s wars. If this project means alienating the village as well as antagonising her daughter and her slain son’s sweetheart, then so be it.
With her “bloody difficult woman” stance, Audrey isn’t just an emblem of Mother England at its most tough-headed, she’s also superb entertainment value. The evening unfolds initially as a secateurs-sharp comedy of middle-class manners, and Hamilton (not seen often enough on the British stage) makes her transfixingly watchable. She bosses her amiably futile husband (Nicholas Rowe), snaps at her melancholy daughter (Charlotte Hope, ace), spars with her lesbian (implicitly Remainer) novelist pal (Helen Schlesinger, brilliantly wafting) and lets a dynamic Polish cleaner (Edyta Budnik, spot on) usurp the place of two retainers (Margot Leicester and Christopher Fairbank, making a sweetly crumbling pair).
Yet as the seasons pass, we come to identify in her obdurate defiance something as poignantly elegiac and patriotically inspiring as the Elgar strains (For the Fallen) we hear at the start. “Romance isn’t false,” she says. “It’s spirit that can inspire real change” – and in her psychological complexity and maternal solicitude lies Bartlett’s consummate even-handedness. We’re in, to quote the garden scene from Richard II, the “fearful’st time”.
Albion makes those fears flower into something remarkable. Our country needs it.