A BRILLIANT ECHO
Shouldn’t be surprised that this is a cracking play: Katherine Moar’s 90-minute debut FARM HALL , about 1940s nuclear scientists, sparked cheers and a West End transfer for her deft, sensitive mastery of both history and human behaviour. This – even brisker at 75 minutes – fictionally reflects another moment of history: the brutal kidnapping of the heiress Patricia Hearst in 1978 by the radical-guerilla-left “Symbionese liberation army”, and her conviction for bank robbery after she was – it seems – drawn into collaboration by “stockholm syndrome” and fell for her rapist.
Moar’s protagonist is called Holly; the other character in the play, fictionalized as Robert, was her famous defence lawyer who, like Hearst’s, failed to get her off a 35 year sentence. As in the real case, she was pardoned after two years by Clinton.
Both are seen at two ages, sometimes at the same moment and finally, thrillingly, arguing with their younger selves. Katie Matsell plays Holly during the trial – young, socialite, arrogant, becoming emotionally dependent on her equally arrogant lawyer, and finally desperate in her horror at the sentence (Matsell here is breathtaking). Abigail Cruttenden is her older self thirty-odd years on, assured, steeled by life. But as the play opens she has been summoned by Robert, who tried to forget about her for years as his only famous failure and now needs her. As a famous rape victim she might, he hopes, speak for him regarding some dark MeToo accusation.
An electric meeting? Oh yes, right from the start. Moar’s dialogue, banteringly sharp with streaks of angry pain, roars along. When their younger selves appear time slips in one startling box-cutter moment, her old rage and his resentment at the failure coinciding.
Nathanial Parker is perfect as the unwillingly-retired, unshaven lawyer on the edge of ruin; Ben Lamb as his younger self revealed as unspeakably cocky, in love with his star-defender fame, giggling along with the Johnny Carson question “was Little Miss girl-scout really afraid for her life or just along for the ride?” . Meanwhile the scared young heiress, in a prison frock, is pleading for him to answer his phone. There’s a fabulous moment when he demands she sign a waiver about his proposed book on the trial, guaranteeing not to write her own for five years. Why should I ? she asks. “It would a kind thing” he says, preposterously. The same tone turns up in his older self, in “I am a fragile person”. Oh, it’s a witty play all right, but there’s anger there.
Brittle echoes over half a century: talk of the counterculture, youth disaffection, “amoral apolitical spoilt rich kids, primed for radicalism” (I write this just as young Samuel from Tunbridge Wells is suspended from Oxford for chanting ‘put the Zios in the ground. Topical or what?). There are also lines on rape victims that hits home hard: the young lawyer is angry that she didn’t cry enough in court, and middle-aged Holly points out that the same tone pervades letters both from middle-aged Robert and the journalist who wants her to condemn him. “Dear Holly, as a woman who was raped you really should do this and say this and think this”. That pious imposition of supposed duty will be familiar to many a victim.
In other words, Moar and the Jermyn – and four fine actors, and nimble director Josh Seymour – have done it again. Get this little gem up West.
jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 15 november
rating 5
theatreCat 