Powerful political drama? No, it’s just an Aga saga
The End Of History... (Royal Court Theatre, London) Verdict: Overpromises, underdelivers Europe (Donmar Warehouse, London) Verdict: Good but obscure
WE COULD really do with a big, ambitious play that plunges into the political and cultural turmoil of modern Britain. Two shows in major London venues looked like they might have been able to do that. One disappoints, the other baffles. The End Of History . . . by Jack Thorne has a provocatively macho title. It references the 1992 Francis Fukuyama book that proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy at the end of the Cold War.
However, what creeps on stage at the Royal Court Theatre is a meek, semiautobiographical mouse of a drama set in Newbury between 1997 and 2017. It quietly frets over how Thorne and his siblings may have disappointed their Leftie parents.
Thorne and director John Tiffany are best known for writing and directing J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, which is running in the West End and worldwide.
More, therefore, might reasonably have been expected.
The play climaxes in a dubious dilemma when the righton parents alarm the grownup siblings by proposing to sell the house and give the proceeds to charity. At best, this is a situation, not a plot. The characters are required to show neither courage nor ingenuity, only to discharge opinions and beliefs.
Lesley Sharp, as the mother, is a wittering dogmatist known for ‘oversharing’ (a phrase that I’m pretty sure didn’t exist in 1997), while David Morrissey as Dad spends much of the play buried in a newspaper. Kate O’Flynn has
a long, tiresome sexting scene as the one who becomes a rich lawyer, and Laurie Davidson is motivelessly moody as the gay younger brother.
Sam Swainsbury as the feckless oldest brother causes mild concern by marrying a horsey posh girl from Hampshire (Zoe Boyle).
HERS is potentially the most interesting part, but Thorne keeps her largely grumpy and silent — before shunting her off altogether.
Grace Smart’s crumbling lath and plaster design, meanwhile, suggests decay, but Tiffany’s production adds little more than stylised timelapse movement between scenes.
At one point, the younger brother grumbles that ‘history is told by
the winners’. That, presumably, means people like the Cambridgeeducated, highly successful Thorne himself. All he offers, though, is a militant Aga saga.
MUCH more interesting — but alas, also far more obscure — is the Donmar Warehouse’s revival of David Greig’s 1994 play Europe, written in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It’s also the play the theatre’s new artistic director, Michael Longhurst, has chosen to open his tenure. (He attracted criticism this week for his new policy of giving ‘trigger warnings’ for productions on the Donmar’s website.)
The writing is a mixture of fourletter AngloSaxon idiom and stark German Expressionism. So, not an obvious crowdpleaser.
Set in the station of an unnamed European border town, characters include a goofy supervisor (Ron Cook) whose Tannoy announcements — ‘The system is collapsing! Customers are advised to make alternative arrangements’ — will sound depressingly familiar to passengers on Southern Rail.
Michael Longhurst’s production features impressive performances, including the gutsy Faye Marsay as a young station assistant who dreams of escaping her loveless marriage to a recently unemployed factory worker (a bewildered Stephen Wight).
She falls in love with a female migrant (mysterious Natalia Tena), while her husband comes under the spell of old friend Morocco (crafty Shane Zaza), a charismatic salesman.
Chloe Lamford’s design creates some symbolic coherence by fitting the station with red tiles as if it were an industrial wound sutured with steel luggage trolleys.
A more cautious artistic director might have chosen to become brave, but start popular. Not Longhurst. He’s a very fine director, as his recent production of Florian Zeller’s The Son has demonstrated by earning itself a West End transfer. Here’s hoping future shows will be popular as well as brave.