Pernicious myths are busted in this superb state-of-the-nation drama
It’s terrific to see Mike Bartlett’s acclaimed state of the nation allegory, first mounted in 2017, back on the Almeida stage, but there is something pyrrhic in the triumph of its return. Albion, strongly indebted to Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, remains the only play in recent years to properly probe the competing visions of Britain that make up our fractured isle. The absence of new works grappling with the seismic ramifications of Brexit is becoming deafening.
Still, any chance to see Victoria Hamilton reprise her role as the savagely entertaining Audrey, who has put aside her London interiors business to restore the once famous gardens of a country house, is only to be welcomed. With more than a touch of the regal hauteur she deployed so magnificently as the Queen Mother in The Crown, she hauls her genially pliant husband Paul (a highly enjoyable Nicholas Rowe) and decidedly less pliant, ambitious publisher daughter Zara (cast newcomer Daisy Edgar-jones) out of the metropolis and sets about asserting her inflexible vision of a lost Eden in chic wellies and cashmere coat with nary a thought for how that Eden might accommodate everyone else. Ferociously driven, frostily aloof, she’s convinced that restoring an English idyll initially conceived as a garden of remembrance for the Great War dead is for the good of the nation. Yet she fails to see that the two old duffers who have worked in the house and gardens for 20 years, the villagers who used to use the gardens for their annual fair, and Donal Finn’s young Gabriel, a nervy, aspiring writer destined to end up working in Costa, are part of the very same rural England she’s hell-bent on mythologising.
Among incisive comment on the cultural schisms between London and the rest of the country, Bartlett’s big subject is idealism, or rather the psychosis bound up in an idealism that has become predominantly individualistic. In the immediate aftermath of the referendum result, this play felt like a warning against the rising tide of populism, as voiced by Audrey’s spiky-tongued best friend Katherine (Helen Schlesinger) – whose burgeoning dalliance with Zara is a direct challenge to Audrey’s control freakery (one of the play’s more subtle themes, played out through Audrey and Katherine’s turbulent friendship, is the innate rivalry between women). Three years on, it feels like a plea to a shattered nation to restore the diminished values of community and empathy.
Rupert Goold’s finely acted production combines rose-tinted pastoralism – lots of dappled light and lilting folk music – with flashes of characteristic showy excess: there’s a frankly bonkers scene in which Anna, the madly grieving girlfriend of Audrey’s dead soldier son James, does something obscene with mud in the garden, while the spectral figure of James himself is clumsily overused. Yet at the same time, the symbol of the fallen British soldier, with its deep connection to the idea of noble sacrifice, is just one of several pernicious national myths Bartlett effectively busts, revealing that James had, in fact, become thoroughly disillusioned with the moral rectitude of his mission in Afghanistan before his death.
Albion is not a perfect play – it’s too schematic in places for that. But the final image of Hamilton’s Audrey, scrabbling about in the mud for a dream she’ll never find, will stay with me for months.