ON THE EVE OF THE ELECTION….
…I emerged onto the Cut in a grey afternoon blinking tears, unable to process having been made to cry by James Corden. He’s been for me a figure hardly more than a mild chat-show irritant ever since he vanished from theatre after One Man Two Guvnors. But on this return, under Matthew Warchus in Joe Penhall’s tense, powerful 90 minute state-of-Britain play we sceptics are reminded that if you plug him in in to a good script and director Corden is the real thing. He walks the walk, travels the terrain, enrages and entertains and threatens and – in final dissolution – shatters you.
I write this on the evening of election day, and dedicate this (late) review to the memory of the late Jo Cox and David Amess, and to all constituency MPs, especially in the hardest areas, who genuinely want to represent and help lives. Of course there are idlers, and monsters, and chancers among any 650 people, but cynicism has no place on a day like this. There is hope. Many are heroic in service. And Penhall’s heroine, played by Anna Maxwell Martin, represents them all. Corden, opposite her in the constituency office where most of this 90 minute drama takes place, represents the immense, intractable, infuriating, demanding people who turn them. We meet him first as an ex-serviceman installing her panic button and CCTV; enjoy the banter about how he went to the same primary school, and see him, step by step, becoming every MPs private nightmare. His wife has left him, moved in a new man, gives trouble over the children, there’s a court action, an inflammatory blog he writes, and an irrational belief that the MP can and should change the law.
The play between them is excellent: as fans of MOTHERLAND know, Anna Maxwell Martin can deploy a wonderful resting-bitch-face, and in her mannish suit and family-woman weariness her MP has – and needs – a hard professional toughness. But her face lights up, pleased about the primary-school link, anxious to help, never despairing. Every bit of sensible advice, however, bounces off the determined, geezerish, clearly troubled hard-man veneer of the persistent constituent.
He becomes angry at not succeeding in his impossible demands for what he thinks is justice: she takes police advice. At first this the DC – wonderfully played by Zachary Hart – offers comic relief as he stonewalls about the importance of avoiding eye contact, empathy and any sign at all of humanity, while Maxwell Martin protests – while on an exercise bike, on Zoom – that her job needs both. There’s a shock and a twist – the MP appears in a sling and bandages, but he hasn’t attacked – and still truculent, Corden holds his own until , in a ludicrously inept “restorative justice” attempt, the policeman’s toxic maleness emerges in turn. It’s electric. You feel the edge, in this moment of divided anger, of a kind of despair. And then, in a last quiet scene when time has passed, a gleam of redemption. Corden’s last appearance is – well, it finished me off.
oldvictheatre.com to 10 August
rating five
theatreCat 