FORTY YEARS ON, FROM TWO PERSPECTIVES
This is a properly interesting RSC commission: a history play about the Falklands invasion by Argentina in 1982 and the British task force which ended it. Accidentally topical too, three weeks after the EU had to apologize for sycophantically calling them “Malvinas” in a Brussels trade deal announcement. And thrilling if you lived through that time as an adult journalist, felt the nation’s temperature and knew some of the protagonists. The play’s author Brad Birch comes at it new, born six years later , with an uncle in the task force, and appreciating the event’s uniqueness via excellent anecdotal research and a brief visit to the islands. He does two things, one successfully and the other not. The best of it – most of the gripping 2 hrs 50 – is an intimate portrait of the tiny island community in Port Stanley and moorland beyond. The unsuccessful bits are attempts to evoke, in cartoonish simplicity, a portentous historic moment: a post-imperial, disaffected, strikebound ’80s Britain trying under a tough new leader ( Thatcher) to forge an identity in military victory. The show’s publicity says Falklanders were “living in someone else’s metaphor”.
But this virtuous decolonializing urge runs up against the fact that the Falklanders were English-speaking, ancestrally settled (no local indigenes on that bleak outcrop), and absolutely did not want to fall under the tyrannical General Galtieri. Birch presents them beautifully: a handful of islanders (composites, of course) introduce themselves and their ways, lively and likeable, getting on with old-fashioned lives, three generations grumbling at one another, welcoming John the new teacher, getting along fine with Argentinian Gabriel from the marine science centre, running the store and local government and sheep and chickens, excited by occasional imports of luxuries like cherries, and in the case of Sally the teenager, desperate to get off to college in England. They blow off steam in “two-nighter” hooleys, and orcas and penguins are everyday sights. They are rural people a bit out of their time, but not rednecks. It prompts parallels like the brilliant COME FROM AWAY, about Newfoundlanders differently shocked by history in the 9/11 plane diversions.
.It’s a great ensemble: Joanne Howarth especially wonderful as old Mrs Hargreaves (“gossip, done right, is a form of exercise”) and so is Eduardo Arcelus as poor Argentinian Gabriel, at first wholly at ease and later miserable in his alienation, disliking the invasion but knowing that back home there is whipped-up national pride. They begin in relative insouciance with streaks of rumbling concern – a school trip cancelled on HMS Endurance because it has to sort out the “scrap metal” invasion of South Georgia (I remember that, naval friends were suddenly alert..). Then comes a call to the ‘defence force’ to get into their uncomfortable uniforms (a wife incredulous: ‘how’s he gonna fire a gun, he misses the toilet seat!”). From the roof a ring of assault rifles descends, pointed at them for the next two hours. A new flag flies, there are orders to stay indoors, carry an ID card, drive on the right. A gradual uneasy fraying of tempers is beautifully done; news of the Task Force is met not only with relief but with a sense of fragility: hardy people humbled by the need to be saved from thousands of miles away , almost an insult to their self-reliance.
The land invasion and shelling of Port Stanley are done with effective restraint by director Aaron Parsons and Aldo Vazquez’ spare design ( little lit model houses and blocks moved around by the cast) . Evoked with sympathy is the grim decline of the young Argentinian conscripts, some dying of exposure and hunger; the local commandant Sebastian (Alvaro Flores) gives orders with dwindling confidence. Confrontations are rare but telling: fury at the invading militia’s dogs bringing diseases, and one descendant of 200 Falkland years baldly pointing out to Sebastian that her family “go back here before Argentina was a country!”
In all this the ensemble is subtle: less so when intermittently made to play UK voices in a modern-millennial-left simplification of ’80s Britain as a declining “near-ungovernable” jingo state led by a fanatical Thatcher who ” needs to pick a fight and win it”. That it was Galtieri who picked it is hardly acknowledged: to create a chorus of wicked-stupid-arrogantTories on the gallery above was obviously tempting given our current lot, but spoils the real delicacy of Birch’s delineation of islanders, invaders and saviours. There is little acknowledgement of the risk (we might well have lost, the military knew it, and defence cuts had sold our only aircraft-carrier, Invincible, Australia and had to claw it hastily back). And while the GOTCHA! STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA! Sun headlines were indeed horrible, anyone with Royal Navy connections or losses will cringe at seeing the task-force depicted by comically jingo men and a Thatchery woman all in white-topped naval officers’ hats. Forget the Sun: Portsmouth and Plymouth did not set out in a triumphal spirit, more in apprehensive dutifulness. Many men died.
Never mind: a new generation must assert its virtue, the Thatcher legend is powerfully theatrical, and the few cringes are outweighed by Birch’s thoughtful contemplation of the islanders and the way that local and family identity is not the same as aggressive nationalism.
PS. if you’ve visited the more prosperous Falklands lately, watching the dismay as Mary’s town store burns down makes it oddly pleasing to have seen that 41 years on, there’s a Waitrose..
Rsc.org.uk. To 16 September
Rating four.
theatreCat 