QUIET DESPERATION, NOISY GUNSHOTS
“Everybody tell the story
Everybody sing the song,
Every now and then a country
Goes a little wrong…”
Hard for it not to feel topical, Sondheim’s extraordinary romp through the thirteen assassination attempts on American presidents since 1865 – four of them successful, some baffling, one downright comic. Polly Findlay’s big-scale spectacular production ( orchestra a powerful 13 strong, ). is set not in the normal funfair but (with rallying from costumed creatures beforehand) in and round the Oval Office where our host, unsurprisingly, has a more than passing resemblance to Donald Trump. It is topical too for hitting at the American culture of letting guns freely fall into the hands of the crazy or vicious – “move a little finger and change the world”. And more globally, topical because so many of the perpetrators indulged a deep sense of entitled, privileged victimhood: unfairness either real or imagined, an outraged belief that “Everybody’s gotta right to be happy”.
So here’s a resentful Confederate, a failed lawyer with diplomatic ambitions, a bottle-factory worker, the lovelorn and the angry and starstruck and disappointed, all confusedly thinking that they must make a mark and headline the news. The particular primacy of US Presidents made it especially obvious.
The structure of Assassins keeps it intriguing: we begin with John Wilkes Booth and the death of Lincoln, but the thirteen shooters are pretty much with us all the time, so that the culminating moment – the one we all remember – sees a sad suicidal Lee Harvey Oswald encouraged not only by Booth and his first successors, but by figures from his future : Sam Byck who shot at Nixon, Gerald Ford’s two incompetent wannabe killers, Hinckley who landed a bullet in Reagan.
It’s 105 minutes and beautifully paced: just when the racket and the rantings might oppress you comes some quiet passage. One is the shamingly comic interaction between Carly Mercedes Dyer, tuneful and wild as Fromme the Manson follower, and Amy Booth-Steel, grumpily frumpy as Sara Jane Moore who took her kid along to her attempt on GErald Ford (who pops up from the orchestra pit, chivalrously, to hand her back her lost bullet). Sometimes it is mesmerically sad, mad and troubling: Jack Shalloo picks up the real pathos of Hinkley’s lovelorn fan of Jodie Foster, and above all Nick Holder is Samuel Byck, in a grimy Father Christmas outfit. He delivers with rare brilliance the yearningly hopeless depressive monologue the man sent on tapes to Leonard Bernstein. You can hear a pin drop. Harry Hepple is a nicely camp Guiteau, delivering a fairly tasteful tap-dancing gallows moment; Danny Mac as Wilkes Booth has an unnerving authority throughout.
It is one of the biggest stagings of Assassins we have seen in recent years, and some may flinch (you have to be absolutely up for a lot of sudden gunshots and barrels pointed right at you). But it is more than worth it for the spectacle, the comedy, the compassion and the outrage as we contemplate “the hopeless, the lost ones”. I hope it transfers…
Box office cft.org.uk. To 24 June.
Rating five (after sleeping on it..it stayed with me that much..)
theatreCat 