Burchill’s half-baked Brexit drama will have majority wanting to leave
‘Our play is not just a play about Brexit but about the intolerance of those who have spent their lives defining themselves as tolerant,” declares never knowingly under-opinionated journalist Julie Burchill in the programme accompanying her playwriting debut.
Having voted Leave “against the interests” of her media-class type, she went on to witness – amused-aghast – the melodramatic and vengeful reaction of Remainers, punishing Leaver friends by shunning them. A theatrical theme was born.
All of which sounds promisingly provocative enough, you think, as the lights go up on a fancy London pad where la Burchill and her writing companion Jane Robins ( journo, novelist) have convened a middle-class book group that’s languidly grappling with Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented
Mr Ripley – in which, you may recall, things take a turn for the murderous between apparent friends.
Theatres should always try to fling open their doors to dissenting voices, testing every liberal assumption going, and I groan at the tedious Remoaning Cleggs and Campbells of this world as much as anyone. But only the most easily pleased Brexiteer would derive much warming comic cheer – or food for thought – from the half-baked “drawing-room drama” that ensues.
Burchill retains a columnist’s knack for a turn of phrase, but that’s a 52per cent curse as much as it’s a 48per cent blessing. All five characters sound as though they’re spouting a script and taking predetermined positions, an issue not helped by a quintet of stilted performances (Ben De Wynter directs, imposing freedom of movement where possible but unable to disguise the stultified, socially stratified atmosphere).
The first half, set on the eve of the referendum, draws the battle lines among wine-swilling former Oxford university pals. There’s Stacey (Gemma Germaine) and Frances (Sarah Toogood) – apparently, though you’d barely know it, a TV producer and a classics teacher – who are an item. A butt of their outspoken humour is a painfully nice, awkwardly fencesitting failed novelist called Will (Paul Giddings). But they’re even more spikily disdainful of the book club’s host, affluent brand manager Ralph (Kamaal Hussain), a walking cliché of a male midlife crisis who has left his wife and kids for young French beauty Clémence (Paris-born Marine André – accent more baffling than beguiling).
The shock result of the vote, which has bien pensant Ralph entertainingly wailing “I don’t think I truly knew the meaning of the word ‘catastrophe’ until now”, accentuates the toxic divisions. With no deference to subtlety (or aversion to the charge of stereotyping), Clémence becomes the minxy foreign cat among the British pigeons. Disdainful of her adoptive country’s philistinism, uncouthness and (boo-hiss) diet, she takes offence at Leave-voting Stacey and Frances’s comments about Muslims, and agitates to have them thrown out before they get to vent about Michel Houellebecq’s Islamo-dystopian novel Submission.
Cue a finale of fisticuffs, but it’s too little a concession towards crude excitement, too late. In an ideal world, the audience would exit arguing about Brexit, but the project offers ever closer union with boredom. You’ll want your evening back.