Hodge-podge history
The Magna Carta Plays
Salisbury Playhouse
Magna Carta, minor achievement. It sounds like a whizzo idea to get four playwrights to respond to the 800th anniversary of the totemic civil rights charter. When it comes to mixed bills, however, a benign dictatorship can work better than a free-for-all. Unless there’s a strong guiding hand steering the direction of travel, the result can be an unedifying mish-mash.
And so it proves here, in the cathedral city with its own copy of the 1215 document. Salisbury Playhouse director Gareth Machin has secured some biggish names to take up the challenge, serving their contributions with a company of nine actors.
Yet the result is less than the sum of its fairly patchy parts, and I was left incredulous that just as Shakespeare makes no reference to Magna Carta in King John, so history repeats itself in a collective avoidance of the crux event – they’ve all run an effortful, creative mile from Runnymede.
At least Anders Lustgarten’s Kingmakers looks back at the point, 10 years on, when the barons pressed John’s son Henry III to reissue the charter.
Using anachronism-- laden mock-Shakespearean verse, it’s a diverting provocation, predicated on the cynical idea of a stitch-up between king and nobs and hammering home the message that the country is still run for the few, not the many. It’s as well the play is short, though; one soon tires of its studenty digs.
Elsewhere, it’s an embarrassment of rags not riches. In Howard Brenton’s
Ransomed, a copy of Magna Carta has been stolen from the cathedral of fictional Melchester and is held by a Russian oligarch who needs a British passport. The “deep” state holds sway, not the plebs, not the police.
Though underwhelming, at least it’s consistently lucid – which is more than can be said of Sally Woodcock’s overly convoluted comedy Pink Gin. It’s set in a corrupt East African country, whose president is in giddy thrall to overseas developers and that colonialera tipple Plymouth gin, but (cursed by a forest-dwelling old woman) keeps dementedly spouting Latin, invoking 1217’s Charter of the Forest.
In We Sell Right, Timberlake Wertenbaker takes a satirical, anti-capitalist pop at privatisation, imagining a future in which all the common folk are refugees and everything has been sold but the auctioned-off word “justice” might flicker a memory of resistance. Hmm… Alas the only thing this well-intentioned show is likely to stir, overall, is a stampede to the car-park. Until Nov 7. Tickets: 01722 320333; salisbury playhouse.com