Loser becomes a dangerous somebody
Royal Court Theatre, London SW1
THE ROYAL Court’s new artistic director Vicky Featherstone kicks off her regime with a play by Dennis Kelly — who adapted Roald Dahl’s book for the musical Matilda — which was commissioned by her predecessor Dominic Cooke. It shows two things. One is Featherstone’s directorial touch for the unexpected. Kelly’s play begins as a lecture for which Featherstone has her cast of seven sitting in line telling us about the formative experiences of Kelly’s title character. He was a very average boy, we are informed, and an equally average man. How then does such a character become one of an elite set of all-powerful tycoons? The play exists to to tell us how, and perhaps infer a few moral lessons.
Featherstone’s biggest surprise here is not the lecture-like staging of the first act but its length. Yet this production shows that having steered the Royal Court away from its traditional territory of the working classes to focus on the middle classes, Cooke became obsessed with giving capitalism a damn good kicking.
Having been regaled with the details of Gorge’s schoolboy friendships and betrayals — and the subsequent squandered opportunities in love — the play suddenly breaks open into enacted (as opposed to described) scenes in which we see the superb Tom Brooke’s painfully gauche and then self-confident Gorge transformed from utter loser into a formidable somebody.
It’s a life story that, like most, hinges on the choices made at crucial moments — choices that can either be moral or self-serving.
Without giving too much away, there would not be a play if Gorge continued to be moral. But by charting the depth of his immoral choices, Kelly questions whether the rewards reaped by Gorge —unimaginable amounts of money — are worth becoming a professional liar, or worth hurting others, for.
It’s an entertaining story inventively told. But ultimately Kelly serves up the kind of reckoning that make us losers feel better about ourselves.
It’s difficult to be specific without spoiling the story.
But I’ve seen morality tales told about mass murderers or dictators who are ultimately haunted by their own decisions and crimes.
They are the kind of story, for instance, in which war criminals are seen having nightmares. But we know this is generally not true. Or at least I don’t believe it. I believe in the main premise of the play — that there is no moral fabric in the universe that guides our behaviour with rewards and punishments, and that if you are bad enough to deliberately hurt people, you’re probably bad enough to live the rest of your life quite happily without suffering the consequences.
How you do that while offering your audience a sense of hope and redemption is difficult.
Which may be why Kelly avoids life’s harsher lesson — that sometimes bad people do rotten things and then live happily ever after.