Journey to the centre of America’s dark heart
The Antipodes National’s Dorfman Theatre, London SE1
No American playwright to have emerged this past decade has a greater claim on our attention than Annie Baker. She gives us America from the sidelines, askance, a country of lost souls, people scraping by, groping for certainties. The Flick afforded a protracted eavesdrop on a few workers at an ailing provincial cinema. John was set in an objetc-rammed Gettysburg B&B, rife with eeriness and eccentricity. Both ran for more than three hours.
Set in a windowless and soulless corporate room, The Antipodes
– coming in at two hours, without interval – is almost Baker-lite. Yet once again she offers a patience-testing verisimilitude. We’re teased with the thought that what we’re witnessing might be interminable. And in lesser hands, Baker’s confection of casual conversation, awkwardly delivered anecdotes and concerted stabs at storytelling could feel that way. But such is the verve of the piece and the vision at its core – about our deep need to “fabulate” and the limits of that activity too – that it grips throughout.
To explain more fully: around a conference table there slouches an assortment of supposed creatives, mainly men. The nasty carpet (designed by co-director Chloe Lamford) has a sexually suggestive pattern. To what end have they been summoned by Conleth Hill’s greybearded, airily serene Sandy? This laid-back boss is shutting them away to liberate their thinking, unearth monsters from their psyche. “I want you to give me your craziest wildest ideas and then we’re gonna distil those ideas down to something incredibly rigorous and specific,” he intones with all the smug self-belief of a hippy West Coast David Brent.
The cast thrives on all the fine detail, making each character – however indistinct – memorable: Bill Milner is a put-upon junior transcribing the desultory thinkings-aloud, Sinead Matthews the charismatic-chaotic odd woman out, while Imogen Doel is the anxious-to-please PA who has a story of her own to share, straight-faced, that’s pure Brothers Grimm.
The title refers to points and people on the other side of the world – long a source of fantastical imagining. And as the evening wears on – shifts in time denoted by subtle (sometimes silly) collective movement – we get to darker realms: cynicism surfaces, a creeping despair too, while some of the behaviour turns weirdly primal.
Without spelling anything out, the evening leaves you pondering where humanity is at, and the value of fictional escapism at a time when the world seems to be falling apart. Its disquieting mood lingers long after its abrupt snap ending.