LONDON — Before we get to the apocalypse implicit in the title of “Death of England,” Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s furious play at the National Theater through March 7, spare a thought for the vocal cords of its tireless lone performer, Rafe Spall.
Spewing 100 minutes of frequently enraged reports from the front line of grief, Spall is asked to sustain a level of vitriol that must be as wearing on his larynx as it risks becoming for the audience. Playing Michael, a verbally uninhibited Londoner in mourning for a father whom he loved, but whose pro-Brexit politics he found abhorrent, Spall animates a racially fractious landscape with a near-maniacal vigor that I’ve not seen before from this gentlest-seeming of actors.
“Death of England” comes from two of Britain’s leading black theater practitioners (Dyer doubles as the director) and is an expansion of a micro-play first commissioned from Williams by the Royal Court Theater and the Guardian newspaper in 2014. In the Dorfman Theater at the National, the stage takes the shape of a St. George’s Cross that cuts through the audience, allowing Spall’s Michael to interact with playgoers at random (“Did you drop something?” he asks a spectator early on) even as he tells us he is talking through the hazy filter of drugs and booze.
Performed without an interval, the production gains visual energy from the sudden appearance of props, embedded in cubbyholes to the side of the set: a roast dinner here, a record album or two there. Through it all, Michael attempts to accommodate the memory of a man about whom he feels as divided as the country in the play’s title.
The narrative may not always add up: Michael’s father is revealed to have had a secret life in the company of a local Indian restaurateur, Riz, the details of which aren’t remotely plausible: Would this man really be seeking literary sustenance with the also-unseen Riz in the predawn hours? The ending, too, takes a lurch toward the sentimental that Michael, of all people, would surely resist. But you have to hand it to the creative team — not least the hardworking sound designers Pete Malkin and Benjamin Grant — for carrying a full-on assault of this sort straight across the finish line, to co-opt the language of sports deployed by the play.
Credibility poses a more significant problem in a longer, more populous play, “The Haystack,” which has been extended at the Hampstead Theater in North London through March 12. Marking the full-length playwriting debut of Al Blyth, the production is the first at this address from the Hampstead’s artistic director, Roxana Silbert, who acceded to her post last fall.
Telling of a surveillance state in which our every move is monitored, the careering narrative devolves into a nasty revenge drama, by which point you’ve lost sympathy for both the hotshot intelligence expert Neil (Oliver Johnstone) and the emotionally damaged journalist, Cora (Rona Morison), on whom he alights first professionally and then romantically. She, for her part, gives scant respect to professional benchmarks like fact-checking and attribution.
It’s a measure of clunky dramaturgy when a play resorts to lapsing into direct address for no other reason but to impart information or gain a spurious relevance. At one point, we’re given a vivid recapitulation of recent terror attacks in London that only distracts from the tortured courtship at the play’s core. The play takes its title, you guessed it, from the proverbial image of a needle in a haystack, but at a running time of nearly three hours, “The Haystack” is at least one bale too many. Compression, not to mention more logical plotting, would seem to be the noninvasive remedy here.
What happens when the world at large simply proves too much? One answer is on compelling view in “Collapsible,” an hourlong play that was a hit at last summer’s Edinburgh Festival. The director Thomas Martin’s keen-eyed production has been extended until March 21 at the Bush Theater, the West London venue devoted to new writing that is on a roll between this and the New York-bound “Baby Reindeer.”
The cunning design by Alison Neighbour tips you off to the precarious state of the internet-addicted Esther, or Essie, whom we find perched atop a plinth of sorts from which she seems about to tumble. (The stage floor looks like gravel but is in fact a mix of various materials including charcoal and cork.) Having lost both a job and a partner, Essie lets rip with a fusillade of language to match Michael’s in “Death of England,” the difference being that Breffni Holahan’s Essie speaks even faster than Spall, if more quietly. The Bush’s studio space seats only 60, which allows for greater intimacy.
Essie’s thirst for news — “the planet bucking like a horse trying to throw us all off and out into space,” as she describes the state of things — provides a daily catalog of woe writ small as well as large. A Sky television modem, we’re wryly informed midway through a litany of far more terrible disasters, has not yet arrived. Margaret Perry, the play’s Irish writer, keeps the images pouring forth in a lava flow of language that the superb Holahan navigates with confidence.
There’s a dark comedy to be found in Essie’s various job interviews, as well as her reckoning with friends and family, from whom she is forever requesting the one word that might best describe her before she slips into a mental abyss. “Smart,” replies her father. “That’s your ration of compliments for the year.”
Both author and performer achieve a neat trick in the closing moments that shouldn’t be revealed here beyond a change in perspective that catches the audience unawares. That is followed by a haunting exchange of the word “OK,” though whether Essie or the world she inhabits really is remains movingly up for grabs.
Death of England. Directed by Clint Dyer. National Theater / Dorfman, through March 7.
The Haystack. Directed by Roxana Silbert. Hampstead Theater, through March 12.
Collapsible. Directed by Thomas Martin. Bush Theater, through March 21.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
