3 October – 2 November
In sitting down to collect my thoughts on last night’s performance I had Bowie’s song, Where Are We Now, running through my mind. One of the first out of the blocks to make some sense of where we are politically, David Edgar, who we might call one of the heavyweights of the genre, has tried (and succeeded) to reduce the explanation to a struggle between opposing camps in a former Soviet satellite colony. Now at a democratic crossroads where communism and capitalism still arm-wrestle for the hearts and minds of the masses and where the old analysis of oppressors versus oppressed has metamorphosed into two camps, those in the ‘rust belt’ and the ‘laptop and latte’ intelligensia.
Such glib divisions are the stock-in-trade of the political strategists-cum-public relations gurus who are brought in by the idealist, Liudmilla Bezborodko (Patrycja Kujawska) to oversee the campaign of Petr Lutsevic (Roderick Hill). The successful and principled American strategist, Rachel Moss (Martina Laird) with her professional partner, Caro Wheeler (Jodie McNee) using all the tools of a democratic strategy, run a winning campaign. However, when the government fails Bezborodko herself runs against Lutsevic. He in turn hires Larry Yeates (Lloyd Owen) the former business partner of Ms Moss.
Unlike the principled Moss, Yeates turns out to be little more than a gun for hire – the image is played out visually to make the point– and takes little persuading to sell his soul. Having seen how western democracy is done he is lured by Leonid Zhudov (Sergo Vares) into using the dark arts of manipulation on a larger canvas, meddling in the democratic process of other countries. The final irony is that those doing the hiring are in fact the arch manipulators. Brexit is suggested as the harvest of the populist seeds sewn by Yeates and his ilk. The play ends with Moss threatening to blow the whistle on his illegal interference in the democratic process.
The play is staged in traverse, where the audience is split into two and faces each other across the stage. Before ‘curtain up’ the stage is hung with multiple screens showing clips of newsreels from recent history. Political and military leaders from the second world war and leading political figures who dominated the international landscape up to the fall of both the Berlin Wall and, subsequently, the Soviet Union. Before act two the screens bring us up to date with clips of recent figures that have helped shape the world we find ourselves in.
The play is thick with theorizing yet both sides are given a fair crack of the whip when laying out the arguments, chilling though some might be. This is intellectual fisticuffs of a high order and a clever exegesis of the new real in politics.
★★★★☆ Graham Wyles 11th October 2024
Photo credit: Ikin Yum
