Putting the fun into philosophy
Cancelling Socrates (Jermyn Street Theatre, London) Verdict: Not all Greek to me ★★★★✩
I WAS afraid that the new play about Socrates, much-revered father of Western philosophy, penned by distinguished veteran Briton Howard Brenton, might be all Greek to me.
But Brenton’s touch is light and bright — and given extra buoyancy by director Tom Littler. With a few stone columns, Up Pompeii- style togas and a soundtrack of rumbling cartwheels, this tiny stage has been transformed into a bustling Athens marketplace in 399 BC.
People are recovering from a plague and attempting to bounce back to normal — whatever that means. Socrates, at the grand age of 70, is on trial for deviating from the norm, charged with denying the gods exist, inventing new ones and corrupting the young, for which the punishment is death. In other words, he is an early victim of cancel culture. A twinkling Jonathan Hyde invests Socrates with a radiant, gleefully impish intellectual energy. His toga is tattered, his mind razor- sharp, but instead of addressing his personal situation, he is untangling philosophical knots with intense flippancy, infuriating the women in his life, who fear they can’t save Socrates from himself.
Their seldom-heard voices are sounded in a wonderfully crisp, often biting scene in which Socrates’s mistress Aspasia (Sophie Ward) claims she has served state and politics, which his wife Xanthippe (Hannah Morrish) dismisses as servicing powerful men. Xanthippe considers her duty to be to motherhood and family. The debate continues, centuries on.
As do those raised by Robert Mountford’s deliciously earthy jailer who finds Socrates’s insistence that the greater the pain, the greater the pleasure a bit ‘airy-fairy’. Understandable coming from a professional torturer. Philosophy as sparky, serious fun.