Crown jewels shine in empty Old Vic
Review
Lungs
In Camera, The Old Vic
★★★★ ★
The Old Vic has a major coup on its hands: two jewels from The
Crown. For a total of eight performances until July 4, Claire Foy and Matt Smith, who starred opposite each other as the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in the first two seasons of the Netflix series, have reunited to play to an empty house down the road from Waterloo station.
Well, not completely empty. Also present as the pair reprise their bravura turns in Duncan Macmillan’s two-hander Lungs – which was staged here last autumn and was poised for a run in New York before Covid-19 struck – are a minimal crew. But they’re not visible. Aside from a recorded introduction from the show’s director (and the Old Vic’s artistic director) Matthew Warchus, the spectacle afforded to a thousand online onlookers at a time (matching the theatre’s number of seats) is simply that of the two actors alone on a barely adorned stage.
The pair play an unnamed middleclass couple who serio-comically fret about the desirability of having a child in an age of climate crisis and overpopulation. Throughout, they observe social distancing. Welcome to the cutting edge of live theatre during the shutdown: a brave new world, and an eerie one.
Over the past three months, there have been various attempts to provide a digital stand-in for the living, breathing, communal art form that so many of us sorely miss. But this is the first time that actors have delivered a live-streamed play in an actual playhouse. You click a link and you watch via Zoom; there’s no foyer crush, no queue for the lavatories, no hobnobbing.
The only nod to the ambience we knew are announcements that the performance is about to begin and – how poignant is this? – recorded pre-show hubbub.
The primary rationale here is financial – the unsubsidised Old Vic needs every penny to survive the crisis. Though each “ticketholder” has the same view, they’re offered a range of seating prices, from £10 –£65, to encourage those with the means to pay more to do so. The theatre isn’t disclosing the amount raised so far, but demand has far outstripped supply.
And something artistically interesting happens too, as Foy and Smith tread the boards. There’s a DIY technical feel to Lungs: In
Camera. We’re a long way from The Crown, at what feels like the dawn of the television age. The duo are juxtaposed via a split-screen format, allowing the illusion of proximity; at times, the casually dressed couple trade places on screen. Yet the no-frills approach contrives to offer an odd quality of intensification.
There’s nothing to fall back on: every facial expression counts, any slip-up would be magnified. The sense of raw exposure, with none of the bolstering audience laughter that was here in abundance eight months ago, chimes with the bleakness of the play’s end-times theme.
And today, it’s as if we’ve sped into the dark future that Macmillan, originally writing in 2011, envisaged. The couple move in an accelerating jump-cut fashion from a simple, catalytic tiff in Ikea, past their personal travails, towards old age. Some lines have gained a serrated edge: the references to riots, a sad plea for connection. “I want to sit opposite you in a restaurant, share a bottle of wine. I want to go to the cinema and hold your hand.”
Winning our sympathy as she did as Her Majesty, and almost as loaded with care, Foy undertakes a marathon of thinking and feeling aloud, welling with emotional angst as she zig-zags towards motherhood, past the ordeals of a betrayal and a miscarriage. Smith – as debonair as he was as the Duke – is by turns languidly aloof, furrowed with concern and twinklingly ardent.
And yes: somehow we catch a glimpse of their vivid on-stage chemistry. We’ll all be exhaling loud lungfuls of relief, though, when this nightmare period ends and we can get up close to British theatre’s big beasts once again.