Going for woke doesn’t always hit the bullseye
Eureka Day
The Old Vic, London
Until October 31, 2hrs
★★☆☆☆
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot
Until October 22, 2hrs 30mins
★★★☆☆
Jonathan Spector’s comedy gets a UK premiere bolstered by star casting – Hollywood’s Helen Hunt – and topical prescience. Eureka Day is about parents who run a progressive California school, torn apart when a mumps outbreak reveals how many are anti-vaxxers. Suddenly, ensuring everyone ‘feels seen’ no longer works. In one very funny scene, an earnest attempt at consensus via Zoom descends into chaos, snarky online comments and hilariously inapposite emojis.
Katy Rudd directs a stellar cast with flawless timing, but this is too safe a send-up. While Spector’s script extends understanding, if not approval, to his characters – giving Hunt’s anti-vax mother a speech which she delivers beautifully – the play feels mounted in bad faith. Ridiculing these ‘woke’ parents, it mines laughs in iffy places (is differentiating between South Asian and South East Asian racial identities really a punchline?).
Some of the smugness and hypocrisy deserves mockery, and is mercilessly caught. But by inflating everything for cheap laughs, it undermines the play’s main question: if every viewpoint is valid, what happens when some are scientifically less so?
To Prescot, home of the new Shakespeare North Playhouse, crafted in pale wood with grey cushioned benches – imagine a Scandi-chic take on the Shakespearean playhouse.
They open with Matthew Dunster and Jimmy Fairhurst’s lively production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s good fun, earning laughs with sweary ad-libs and audience participation.
The main gimmick is that half the cast have food poisoning, meaning the theatre’s front-of-house staff must step in – linking nicely with the Rude Mechanicals’ own amateur theatrics, and adding extra comic confusion and backstage drama.
What it doesn’t do is help the clarity of story for those less familiar with Shakespeare. It’s also a naff way to justify having only the voice of David Morrissey as Oberon. They’ve netted gorgeous-voiced singer Nadine Shah as Titania – giving her no one to act against unbalances the play.
An enjoyable if uneven opening, then, to a lovely new theatre.