The wrong type of Christmas snow
Identity politics, feminism, generational divides, climate change, Brexit… This decade has been the gift that has kept on giving for playwrights, and Mike Bartlett has been more terrier-like than most in scenting dramatic potential.
From Love, Love, Love (due to be revived next March), which anticipated this year’s antagonistic catchphrase “OK, boomer” 10 years ago, to his magnificent 2017 Brexit-steeped family drama Albion, coming back to the Almeida (scene of another triumph, King Charles III) in February, he’s incredibly adept at tying individual mental anguish to wider societal pressures and fractures.
Small wonder TV has snapped him up. Having made his name and kept us gripped with Doctor Foster (2015), the three-parter Sticks and Stones, now airing on ITV, reaffirms his nose for the psychological thriller – registering high desperation and derangement inside the world of middle management.
It’s hardly conducive to Yuletide cheer and those expecting end-of-year uplift from Snowflake, penned as a festive-season offering for the Old Fire Station, Oxford last year, revived (and revised) now for Kiln, Kilburn, should approach it with caution, like a boobytrapped present under the tree.
An inspired fusion, again, of the personal and the political, it might almost be a companion piece to
Albion. And in some ways – thanks to his redrafting but also fortuitous circumstance – this smaller-scale affair is yet more up to the minute. Set this Christmas Eve, and referencing Bojo as PM, it pinpoints in its familial showdown a collective yearning for healing after much strife.
Giving a career-best performance, the under-sung Elliot Levey plays Andy, the sort of middle-aged, middleclass white male that prejudiced metropolitans might dismiss as “gammon”. He works in an Oxfordshire museum, most of his cultural references are passé, and most of his happiest memories lie in the past, too, following the death of his wife six years ago. He dons a naff Christmas jumper amid an embarrassment of tatty decorations in the church hall he has hired for a hoped-for reunion with his daughter; he’d be laughable if his pain wasn’t so palpable beneath that nerdish-sensible yet neurotic exterior.
The evening morphs into a ding-dong between a millennial and a blunter, ‘unwoke’ generation X-er
Our eyes glance, as his do, towards the door through which, as he mentally rehearses the encounter, he imagines Maya – whom he hasn’t seen for three years – will step.
But the minutes go by and instead in comes a stranger, 25-year-old Natalie (Amber James), who arrives seemingly to put the kitchen in order but swiftly lays siege to his composure, needling him with questions, blasting at his old-school complacency and emotional illiteracy.
The evening morphs from a monologue into a bitterly entertaining ding-dong between a representative of the so-called “snowflake” generation – millennials who purportedly privilege feeling, often easily wounded feeling, over all else – and a blunter, “unwoke” generation X-er.
It’s a measure of Bartlett’s skill that what could be lumpen keeps sympathies shifting and intelligence engaged.
Rattle the theatrical parcel and you can tell what’s inside: it’s not hard to guess who voted which way in the referendum, but Bartlett also opens up the broader culture wars with which we are riven. Like some prehistoric creature, Levey’s self-defeatingly agitated yet still likeable everyman bellows roars of despair on behalf of his kind and all those denounced as toxic for misjudging tone or making an ideological misstep.
Yet there are equally impassioned and persuasive cries for the young to be listened to as well. There is (a knowingly corny?) miracle of a resolution that ties things up. All the same, the play (directed by Bartlett’s wife Clare Lizzimore) is a legit wonder; and its debates will rumble on.