CAMPUS RITES AND WRONGS
Sometimes, I do like a stage set you could cosily move right into. Paul Farnsworth’s is a nice evocation of a Harvard professor’s study: shelves and panelling and framed certificates, and a leather chair redolent of five generations of chin-stroking academe and Democrat politics. Oh, and there’s a model yacht: things will happen to that.
The latter matters, because the witty poster for Paul Grellong’s play, written in 2019 and suddenly even more topical on its European premiere, has that same pointed sail with two black roundels added, making a Ku Klux Klan hood. We learn in moments that Professor Charlie (Julian Ovenden) is running a symposium on extremism, and has rashly invited some chap called Carver who is a white-supremacist Klansman of evil repute. It’s all in the good cause of “taking his pants down” and exposing the monster’s absurdity in fearless debate. Just as liberal academics always feel they can.
The students are in full no-platforming rage, and the Dean (Tanya Franks) is furious with Charlie. He argues back, saying that “we need to face this threat, let light in” , and that you can’t give in to a “tribunal of triggered children”. His old friend Baxter (Giles Terera, the last NT Othello) now has a cool TV presence which Charlie rather resents, and turns up to join in the protest at giving Carver a platform
His ex-student Lucas , a PhD, rolls in on his side though on his side, though quipping “I hate hatred”, and being a bit fed up and not getting tenure where he wanted it because of diversity. Meanwhile a student,, Maggie, invites Charlie to an “SSM”, a Safe Space Meeting, with the protesters. She snarls “I don’t sit down with white supremacists” when it transpires Charlie has not only agreed a pre-meet with Carver at his gated compound in the woods, but is going to include cocktails and dinner with him, the fool. Lucas agrees to go along too. The professor murmurs “perhaps I need a disguise!’. “Try a hood” says someone.
It’s a funny start: sharp witty lines running through the familiar de-platform arguments , and you feel for a while that maybe you’re in a talky-talky Stoppardy philsophical piece. But no: just as the set itself intriguingly swivels and re-forms to be a station platform, a favourite bar, later on the Dean’s home, the story swivels too. And darkens. And after the offstage catastrophe at its centre it offers a couple of flashback scenes which make a lot of things clearer.
One occurs in the panelled study; the other final one, more alarming still, in a bar-room exchange of horrid emotional truths between Baxter and Michael Benz’s chillingly clever Lucas (Michael Benz holds Lucas’ dual nature beautifully in balance : believed in him all the way). So we see unveiled not only a certain hidden motive , but the revelation that at least one white-skinned, coastal-academic liberal with irreproachable modern views is no such thing.
There are domestic and professional undercurrents, a brick through the window finishing off the sacred model yacht, and offstage as usual the proof that words can prove lethal. Maybe some of the plotting is a bit too pat, but you leave with your preconceptions adjusted a bit, and an uneasy sense that in the world of academia nobody is ever quite as sincere about anything as they smoothly seem.
menierchocolatefactory.com to 12 may
rating four
theatreCat 