Playing games of diplomacy
Winner’s Curse Park Theatre | ★★★✩✩ Reviewed by John Nathan
THE BEST lines in this new play arrive at the end when its hero Anton Korsakov (Michael Maloney), the diplomat of a fictional east European country that is teetering on war with its neighbour, coins a wise old saw learned during a lifetime of diplomacy.
“We all need a vision. We make it holy with our blood,” he says. Because this is written by former Israeli ambassador Daniel Taub who has also served as one of his country’s international peace negotiators, it has a weight and authority that few other playwrights could muster.
Yet it is almost lost in this quirky evening hosted by Clive Anderson and which ambitiously, and not always successfully, attempts to combine audience participation with knockabout comedy.
Written with contributions by game show TV producer Dan Patterson, the play section sees Anderson’s award-winning elder statesman Hugo Leitski recall the tense international negotiations during which his younger self (Arthur Conti) cut his teeth as assistant to his mentor Korsakov. The action is set in a rural hotel run by Nichola McAuliffe’s eccentric landlady.
Leitski interrupts his own flashback to workshop negotiation techniques with his audience. Here Anderson is good, playful, ad-libbing company as he asks his audience to conduct such games as drawing an imaginary letter P on their forehead. To give the illuminating reason here would ruin the exercise.
But every time we return to the play action, with its characters as broad as the M1, the energy and entertainment level of Jez Bond’s production dips.
The most that can be said about the show is that there is nothing else like it. More a curiosity than a play, Winner’s Curse is the spawn of two incompatible forms of entertainment that limps to its conclusion, though also to that thought provoking line.