Even Trotskyites would hate this anarchist dirge
WELL, it seems that playwright James Graham is fallible. He was widely feted after his hit play about the 1974 hung parliament, This House, at the National Theatre in 2012.
Then he wrote privacy, the moderately interesting show about personal data on the internet at the Donmar, followed by The Vote, which opened at the same theatre last night. This, though, is another matter.
The play is about four young anarchists who called themselves the Angry Brigade and who tried to bomb a Miss World contest at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970.
The first half focuses on four keystone cops at Scotland Yard trying to track them down.
led by Harry Melling (Dudley Dursley in the Harry potter films), they slowly morph from stereotypical plods into disaffected revolutionaries. point made about police and criminals mirroring each other and no need for a second half, you would hope.
But Graham presses on, regurgitating undigested radical dogma with hardly a character to be seen.
Instead we get a cut-and-paste job of seditious political theory interspersed with skits on consumerism, including the Fairy liquid ad.
Slogans between scenes are cut with music from Blaxploitation films and flashes of hardcore porn. No idea why.
To be honest, I was quite looking forward to this. The Seventies were, after all, a time of vivid political engagement when left and Right were scrapping over the heart and soul of the nation. James Grieve is a fine young director, too.
But this leaden production with cork floor tile and metal filing cabinet design by lucy Osborne is a dull, incomprehensible two and a half hours.
Nor was I convinced that the actors in their various parts knew whereof they spoke. Melling’s adenoidal cockney and mannered acting makes all six of his roles seem identical.
pearl Chanda, Mark Arends and lizzy Watts are competent in other parts, but seem to have no more of a clue about what was going on than I did.
Even an anarcho-syndicalist, crypto-Trotskyite paranoid conspiracy theorist from a Hackney squat might struggle to make sense of such shenanigans.