Ink

James Graham has a remarkable knack of taking flamboyantly worthy subjects and turning them into dazzling comic thrillers. Who would honestly have thought This House, a drama about the maintenance of the Lib-Lab coalition of the late seventies would be anything more than 'interesting'? But it turned out to be a hilarious hit and transferred to the West End. There is more obvious meat in the story of Rupert Murdoch's takeover of The Sun, but in most people's hands it would have been surely rather earnest. Ink is a sensation, really. Powered by a Rupert Goold production in Enron mode, the play is honestly just breathtakingly enjoyable. It's three hours long but it zips by.

Here's the thing I am always interested in with James Graham's plays. He has invented a role of being the playwright who writes about politics, and by that I mean his actual subject matter is politics. He wrote some fine early plays that are not obviously political (The Man, The Whisky Taster, A History of Falling Things and more), but a few that were (Coal not Dole, Eden's Empire, Tory Boyz, and more) but with This House he seems to have found his footing. His subject matter is political parties, MPs, chief whips, back room deals and ballot boxes, iconic moments of political history and forgotten cul-de-sacs of political ambition. 

But writing about political subjects doesn't necessarily make a play political. While he has, by his own admissions, a geek's fascination with the minutiae of modern political history, he does not always give us a clear sense of his view of these matters. Ordinarily, I like this; I'm bored of plays where the playwright is all-too-obviously editorialising and telling us what to think. But when the topic is so manifestly political, it is sometimes a shock to have the writer step back from commentary.

Here's an example. In 2015, he wrote a play about the small-time English political terrorist group The Angry Brigade. It's a game of two halves; one act focuses on the police investigation, the other with the Angry Brigade themselves. The police half is somewhat Ortonesque in tone; as the investigation gets deeper into the counter-cultural milieu from with the Brigade emerged, a spirit of anarchic sexuality invades the police station and the act ends with the investigation and the police roles in wild abandon. The Brigade act, conversely, begins in dramaturgical and thematic anarchy, but slowly members of the group begin to rebel against the complete freedom, particularly sexual, of their principles and order begins to assert itself in the desire for stability, for love, for commitment.

What fascinates me is that Graham insists that the two acts can be performed in either order, police first or Brigade first. This makes a huge dramaturgical difference. If it's police first, the shape of the play is to begin in order, drift into disorder by the interval ands then watch as order slowly reasserts itself. If it's Brigade first, we watch disorder temporarily solidify into order before chaos breaking out once more. Put another way, putting the police act first seems to suggest that order will always triumph; the Brigade first tells us that anarchy will always assert itself. By not determining which act to put first, Graham has fascinatingly opted out from that crucial judgment. Is this apolitical or itself a political decision?

Ink is very clarifying in terms of these debates. Ever since I can remember having political views of the world, Rupert Murdoch has loomed pretty large in my own demonology. Wapping, Page Three, 'If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights', Fox News, phone hacking and more. He is as close to unredeemable as it gets. He's as close to evil as it gets. But you know what? Ink has you rooting for him. In the first half, as he barges awkwardly into Fleet Street and comes up against smug, patrician complacency, a superior disdain for this interloper who doesn't understand the British traditions of journalism, you are urging him on as he tears apart the stuffy snootiness of Hugh Cudlipp and the rest of the British press. I don't think I've ever before felt sympathy for Rupert Murdoch in my life.

This might be valuable in itself, I suppose. We should always try to understand why our enemies behave the way they do. It's not good to dismiss any human being as evil or unredeemable. But actually there's something subtler going on here and it's a sign, I reckon, of James Graham dramaturgical sophistication that is easy to miss in amongst the razzle-dazzle of the play's humour, its pace and the production's ferocious pleasures.

There are two stories overlaid on each here: one is a rags-to-riches and the other is a rise-and-fall. It's the story of The Sun itself that is a rags-to-riches. When Murdoch takes it on, it's the joke of Fleet Street: a newspaper lagging behind all of its tabloid rivals in terms of sales, respect, impact. It's clear that if Murdoch hadn't bought it, it would probably have been shut down. By the end of the play it seems to have become the best-selling daily paper in the world. It's a single upward trajectory right the way through the play.

But then there's a rise-and-fall story. This is the story of Murdoch and his editor Larry Lamb. And this figures slightly different for the two of them. For Murdoch, there's a kind of Frankenstein story: he wants The Sun to be brash, populist, successful and he urges Lamb to do whatever it takes to get there. But when Lamb actually does these things, Murdoch seems to be slightly horrified, especially when (spoiler alert) a campaign over a kidnapped woman seems to contribute to her demise and we see the dark side of introducing Page 3. He has lashed himself to a chariot that is out of control. For Larry Lamb, it's different: an old-school journalist, trade unionist, a man with vision and principles, he has abandoned some of them to make the paper Murdoch wants, but he's actually made a full conversion: he wants the paper to be brash and crass and ignorant and sensationalist. So by the end his and Murdoch's positions are reversed; he's the one mocking the interloper for timidity. His rise and fall is in our eyes; his rise is at the expense of a moral fall.

Dramaturgically what's smart is that this means that in the first half of the play the two stories are in sync (both rising); we are rooting for the new venture. In the second half they diverge - as the paper is rising, the men associated with it are falling. And this is where the commentary starts to come in as we experience the widening gap between two definitions of success, financial and moral. Interestingly, we still feel something for Murdoch as he struggles with the monster he's created.

Over all of this hangs the shadow of everything else we know about The Sun, its degrading impact on our culture, its casual pornification of the mainstream, its brash Toryism, the paparazzi culture, the phone hacking and so on. In its coercive appeal to 'ordinary people', pumped full of conservatism and prejudice, it's part of the long process of normalising right-wing views and leading to the contempt for evidence, facts and reality that - it isn't going to far to say - leads to Brexit. Even as we enjoy Murdoch's trouncing of the old guard, this gives us pause. Be careful, the play seems to be saying, what you wish for.

Ink is a much cleverer play than it might seem. Its rush, its brio, its great jokes, its big characters could mislead you into thinking it's a romp. But finally it's asking big questions about us now, how we got where we are today and how it might have seemed like a good idea at the time.

Oslo

I met J T Rogers for a Platform at the National Theatre when his play Blood and Gifts was on. As I recall, he'd actually forgotten that he was meant to do a platform that evening and had gone out for a celebratory lunch with his visiting parents. But far from being annoyed at being dragged back to the National, he arrived filled with lunch and ebullience and joie de vivre and probably some wine (libel lawyers: this is speculation on my part). So the platform we did was, despite putatively discussing a play about the CIA's disastrous engagement in Afghanistan in the 1980s, an extremely jolly affair, full of warmth and laughter.

I thought the same watching Oslo. Since having a baby, chances for me and Lilla to go to the theatre together are fairly rare, so I buy two tickets with some care. I'm not sure what persuaded me that a reenactment of the 1993 Oslo peace accords between Israel and Palestine would be perfect date night material and nor, to judge by the look on her face as I outlined to her the evening before us, did Lilla. But in fact Oslo is a bit of a riot, full of jokes and large-than-life characters and moments of sharp tension alternating with some letting-your-hair-down moments. I won't say the three hours whizz by but it feels like a pleasure and not the expected chore.

The play is about a set of secret negotiations instigated by two rogue Norwegian diplomats while the Washington-sponsored peace talks were stalling. These two, Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul, managed to keep the thing mostly secret, holding the talks in a castle outside Oslo, persuading the deeply suspicious Israelis to get more and more involved in negotiations, persuading the Palestinians to suspend their historical ressentiment in favour of open negotiation. And the thing led ultimately to that handshake between Yitzak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in September 1993.

Well, no, not 'ultimately' because then came the assassination of Rabin, the failure of Camp David II, the second Intifada, the election of Ariel Sharon, a terrible new wave of suicide bombings, Operation Defensive Shield, that Wall, the rise of Hamas and Fateh, the blockade of Gaza, rocket attacks on Israel, Operation Cast Lead, and more.

The way Rogers makes this play work is to pick on Terje Rød-Larsen's central idea. Terje is also an academic and he has a theory that international negotiations should not be pitched at the highest organisational or ideological level but at the lowest level: the personal and the particular. So, rather than sit and debate whether Israel has a historic right to exist, the Oslo negotiations talked about who would staff the checkpoints and who would collect whose rubbish. And rather than stand on formal ceremony as 'The Israeli Foreign Minister' and 'The Palestinian Finance Minister', participants in the negotiation were encouraged, at the end of the day, to talk personally, about their lives, their families, their childhoods; to drink together, eat together, laugh together.

Whether this is all a true depiction of the Oslo accords, I don't know. Terje, in the play, is a rather preening individual so if the play comes from his account of these events, it would not be surprising to find that this element was wildly exaggerated. But it gives Rogers licence to present these as rounded human beings and not ideological positions. That doesn't mean there isn't room for a lot of negotiation, because there is, but we watch not just the conflict between the Israel and Palestine claims but between private and public man.

I say 'man' because it is 'man'. This is a very blokey play. Perhaps inevitably, because it's based on the history, but even Mona Juul, the other rogue diplomat, seems to have no agency whatever and is given the compensatory position of narrator. There's a decent part for a gifted Norwegian female cook who furnishes the negotiations with waffles. But apart from that the women are walk ons and its men in shiny suits who dominate.

It's the old verbatim problem, in a way. The desire of much verbatim to restore the democratic deficit, to place us inside those rooms from which cameras are banned, means that those rooms are so often filled with men; and that means, from Half the Picture to Stuff Happens, the theatre rooms end up filled with men, too.  Once in a while, that's okay, but I wondered what a play about the Oslo accords might look like that wondered what role male ego played in the intransigence. Oslo doesn't really care about that.

Rogers is very skilful at finding in the source material some wonderful structures. There is the difference between being in the negotiation room and outside it, which creates a visual-spatial clarity about the different roles the participants are called upon to play. Second, the Israelis were implacably opposed to meeting members of the PLO and so for the early rounds of negotiation, Israel was represented by two academics from Haifa. This creates an interesting tension, between the two Palestinian negotiators and their not-quite counterparts; it fuels the frustration, the insult, the resentment. By drawing attention to it, this allows the undramatic nature of their conflicts to become dramatic. It is after the interval, when Israel decides the talks are valuable enough to 'upgrade' and bring an Israeli government official into the talks, that the play goes up a gear, by introducing Uri Savir, director-general of the Foreign Ministry as Israel's representative. I don't know about the historical Savir but this one is a brattish, bragging, cocky, charming, self-dramatising, tower of ego and he really sets the stage alight (not literally). And then they trade up further bringing on a sceptical lawyer to relitigate the agreement, bringing whole new kinds of tension into the room. Finally, Rogers draws on as many peculiar interruptions to the smooth running of the process as he can, from two stray German tourists who interrupt proceedings to an awkward paper jam in the photocopier on the eve of signature. I assume these things are real; they're not interesting enough to have been made up.

And there's a thing. This kind of documentary-drama relies particularly on what Roland Barthes calls 'the reality effect'. He suggests that in 'realist' narratives (whether that means realist novels or history books) the tiny inconsequential detail has a particular force. These moments - the paper jam, for example - do not contribute structurally. They do not bring about a twist in the plot; they don't even really add much tension (a paper jam?). These 'insignificant notations', as Barthes calls them, do not contribute meaning to the texture of the whole, instead they produce meaning by their very excess, their inessentiality. As Barthes says, they 'say nothing but this: we are the real' (148). By their semantic redundancy, they accumulate a new second-order meaning that tells us (or tries to tell us) that this really happened. But for that to function, they must seem drab, ordinary, dull (a paper jam). I'll repeat what I said above: these moments are not interesting enough to have been made up.

(By contrast, there is a moment, just before the White House handshake where the Palestinian delegation have made a last minute change to the agreement and everything looks about to collapse; at which point a US diplomat comes in and just tells everyone what they're going to do. The moment might be real but it is so embedded in the creaky dramaturgy of 'third act jeopardy' that it looks false.) 

This does create a theatrically depressive effect on so much documentary drama. It's required to impose a certain boringness on proceedings to ensure the audience accepts what is happening as real. In this play, this works because it's the mortgage that buys us Uri Savir, but we get his flamboyance only because of the shiny suits, the table arrangements, and the paper jams.

And in terms of this production is perhaps explains the horrible set. It's basically a large upstage flat with some wings (trust me: the photo above way flatters it). These pieces are all slightly curved and not entirely facing the audience, which creates a little more movement in the space, and they do half-heartedly project some stuff onto the walls, but nothing can hide that this is a set from an era of theatre design that I thought died sixty years ago. I've not seen anything this old-fashioned at the National since the Comédie Française brought their production of Marivaux's Les Fausses Confidences for a short run in 1997. During some of the longueurs (and don't believe the hype, there are some), I just stared at it, crossly, uncomprehending. You can see the joins in it. It's both monumentally dull and slightly amateurish. It's the ugliest set I can remember. But I wondered, maybe the dullness of the set is part of the point? It establishes its historiographic reliability. I just wish there was another way to do it.

Apart from the intrinsic interest of the subject matter, the real joy of this production are the quartet of participants in the negotiations. On the Palestinian side Ahmed Qurie played by Peter Polycarpou and Hassan Asfour played by Nail Elouahabi; on the Israeli side Philip Arditti inhabits Uri Savir and Joel Singer gives us Yair Jonah Lotan. Polycarpou is wonderful as the patrician Qurie, all bruised pride at any insult to his dignity and status; Elouahabi's is the firebrand Marxist radical who nearly scuppers the talks at the very beginning. There's a gorgeous moment where the cook comes in and explains how her prize waffles are made and then how she recommends you eat them; the negotiators all sit their slightly stunned, following her instructions - and at one moment, Elouahabi glances over at his neighbour's bowl, like a boy cheating in a maths test. It's a beautifully humanising moment and says as much as longer scenes of the men swapping childhood anecdotes. Philip Arditti's hyperactive performance manages to do something difficult, to make Savir both ridiculous and admirable. When he first arrives, he is all arrogance and superiority, but Terje rightly suspects this nerves. Later that evening, pumped up from the talks, Uri joins his hosts at their home and explains with boyish glee the (unnecessary) precautions that he took to disguise his movements. It's sweet and ridiculous but we also sense how high the stakes are for these talks. Joel Singer has the smallest of the four roles but he brings an icy note to the stage, seeming to halt everything with a mixture of venom and pedantry, suspicion and legalism. I wasn't overjoyed by the other performances, to be honest. Toby Stephens is probably good but he's just not my kind of actor; Terje is supposed to be self-advertising but should the actor be that too? Lydia Leonard performs Mona Juul with wry ease, but I felt perhaps a little too much wry ease. One false move and this could become the West patting itself on its undeserved back.

Because these talks were a breakthrough but they have hardly solved things. The final scene allows us to catch up with events since the signing and it's not encouraging. (In fact, it could be accused of being less encouraging than necessary.) At that point in the evening, although I'd enjoyed myself, I was ready for things to end, so I say with reservation that I felt I'd have liked to know more about that - what the play thinks now about all that comic subterfuge to create a peace accord that seems now to have mostly unravelled. If - as is momentarily suggested - this a too-European view of the events, in which case isn't that to fundamentally undermine the whole play? 

The Majority

There's an intricate and complicated play of liveness and repetition, of reality and theatre, in Rob Drummond's The Majority. We're sitting in the Dorfman and we all have keypads on lanyards round our necks. The show is a monologue, in dialogue with us: Rob Drummond tells us a true(?) story about a chance encounter in the immediate aftermath of the Scottish Independence vote and the picaresque journey into political activism that turns on a piece of direct action that got the narrator into some trouble but also provoked an anguish realisation about what is wrong with our political discourse. At points we use the keypad to vote in response to certain questions.

Frequently during the show, Drummond - actually, I'm going to call him Rob; he seems so friendly. Frequently, during the show, Rob reassures us - or seems to be trying to reassure us - that this is all just theatre. At other moments, he seems exhilarated by moments from his story that were 'real, not just theatre'. But what is theatre and what is real in this show? As we drift out of the auditorium at the end, the screens around the stage show - or appear to show - photographs that corroborate at least some part of his story. Is the story he tells us real? He owns up to a couple of adornments to the tale, implying of course that the rest is all as it was, but is this true? As I note later, there are bits of the story that, perhaps deliberately, don't add up. I wondered often if the keypads really were working; how would we know? In fact, I wondered if my keypad was working. Not because I genuinely thought it wasn't, but I found myself frustrated that my splendid individual vote was lost anonymously in the crowd of others.

And that's part of the point. This is a show that brings firmly to the centre of our attention the flaws and burrs and conundrums of voting. We are asked probably something around 20 questions during the show. At times, I responded easily. At others, I hesitated. At moments, I wanted him to define the terms of the question more precisely. At one point, I felt the need the explain my vote (and could have). At some points, we, the audience, applauded our own votes (there was around a 90% vote against Brexit and we all burst into applause, for, what? For our own opinions. More on this later.)

And Brexit hangs heavily on this show, or specifically the Referendum does. But I guess it's going to hang heavily on most British theatre shows for a few years. The title The Majority put me immediately in mind of Alexis de Tocqueville's notion of the 'tyranny of the majority' which he observed particularly in America, but we can all feel it in the winner-takes-all logic of the Brexiteers. You lost, get over it.

There was something weird about the keypad, which somehow emphasised that curious shuttling between liveness and repetition. The keypad both felt very live - my vote was actually going to affect something that would show up on that screen up there - and repetitive - I'm making the same gesture again and again, the keypad (and the screen) is an instrument of the mediated world, plus my nagging doubts that the keypad was even working. There's a very interesting moment where he brings up the website of a Scottish neo-Nazi called Ralph Weiss. Rob tells us that he has discovered Ralph's real name and address and he wants to post it up on the guy's website. He hesitates, because this could expose the guy to danger. And we get to vote on whether he presses send or not. This feels, momentarily, like a moment of liveness with bells on (liveness plus jeopardy plus high stakes). Of course, the doubts creep in: is this actually a real website? There seemed to be a captcha box that he didn't fill in. Surely a neo-Nazi with a personal website would set his site up so he approved comments before they appeared? SPOILER ALERT: And now I do a bit of googling and it looks like this was actually a fake. I feel slightly disappointed.

This moment, though, takes us into the darker and more important questions of the show. SPOILER ALERT: the turning point in his story is when he has been drawn into a political action, a counter-demonstration against fascists (probably) who are protesting against Syrian immigrants being allowed to settle in Scotland. Later he sees one of the fascists (probably) with his guard down and he punches him in the face. For this he gets a suspended sentence and the growing sense that this is exactly what is wrong with our politics. We have become so polarised, we risk dehumanising the opposition, to the point where we feel it is acceptable to assault someone physically because of their opinions. This nagging concern builds, thanks to what is either (a) an elegant (and oddly old-fashioned) dramaturgical device involving a letter or (b) something that actually happened, into an impassioned call for dialogue, for respecting one another's point of view, for saying, when encountering people with whom we disagree 'That's fascinating. Why do you believe what you believe?'

As someone who has, like Rob (really or fictionally), engaged in Twitter battles with alt-right nutters with their Pepe avatars and endlessly repeated vocabulary (cuck, libtard, liberal tears, Kek, virtue signalling, etc.), this hits home to me. Perhaps the liberals and the left did spend too much time abusing Trump's supporters as racists and not enough time trying to understand their position and discussing it with them. Perhaps the liberal elites of the metropolitan centres did dismiss the views of the Brexit voters and maybe that's been going on for decades. Perhaps we do talk to ourselves too much. Perhaps a lot of our political engagement is like this audience, applauding one another for correctly holding our beliefs. 

But here's where the liveness of the show is complicated. I think it would have been very different watching this show a week ago. At one point, Rob laments that we all too easily describe our opponents as Nazis and racists. But Charlotteville is surely a reminder that some of our opponents are Nazis and racists. When Rob tries to remind us that they're not all Nazis, it's hard not to hear an echo of Donald Trump's oily prevarications ('not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me' he said in his disastrous, repulsive press conference on Tuesday). Rob worries that we have got ourselves to a point where we think it's okay to assault people because of what they believe, but again, I hear an echo of Trump, focusing only on the actions and not the broader picture. As it happens, I am uneasy about using violence as a political weapon, though to see all violence as intrinsically the same is to indulge in Trumpian moral equivalence (isn't it?). I wouldn't have thought these things - or at least not with the same force - a week ago. The liveness of the show means that the ground is shifting beneath it. Its liveness almost undoes the show. At the moment, it must be an extraordinary thing to perform, because the resonances of these debates are urgent and changing all the time.

Which is probably why I'd like the moral temperature of the show to be turned up a bit. Rob Drummond is a terrific performer: mild, outraged, likeable, sweet in manner, which means that when he punches the guy, it wrongfoots you in an interesting way. It feels odd, but interestingly odd. It's shocking, barely credible. But, for me, the keypad-voting device never lets the intensity of the debates ratchet up enough. There's always a certain novelty feeling to it - even when we're answering one of the many variants of the Trolley Problem - not helped by a kind of gameshow theme tune that rings out each time. The technology feels maybe gimmicky? I felt the same thing a few years ago in Rimini Protokoll's Best Before where we all had a handset and played a kind of video game through the show. Maybe I just don't go for that sort of thing, but it feels lighter than I think it should. 

The show leads to a final vote where we are asked whether it is ever helpful to be abusive to people (Rob explains 'physically or verbally') for the opinions they hold. He has steered us pretty strongly to say no. I voted yes. Why? Not because I think you should punch people for their beliefs. And not because I think it is 'helpful' to shout 'racist' at someone who admits to some mild discomfort with immigration. But what counts as abusive? How about mockery? I suppose I think it can be helpful to mock someone's beliefs because it's a ferocious way of communicating that some beliefs are ludicrous. And then, what is a belief? Beliefs aren't private mental attitudes locked quietly away in our heads are they? If I know what someone's belief is, it's because they've expressed it and expressing a belief is an action. When the protestors attacked the white supremacists in Charlottesville, it wasn't because of the white supremacists' beliefs: it was because they were expressing those beliefs by marching with torches, shouting fascist slogans, using paramilitary groups to intimidate people, and focusing their actions on defending a symbol of support for slavery. Of course not everyone who voted for Trump is a neo-Nazi. Not everyone who voted for Brexit is a racist. But equally we shouldn't let some elaboration of Godwin's Law stop us from identifying and calling out the rise of genuine fascism - and we are seeing the emboldened resurgence of fascism, here and in America and elsewhere.

Rob tells us that dialogue is vital. He thinks difference of opinion is important. If we all thought the same, we'd learn nothing. And he tells us that he's going to the Dorfman foyer and he wants to talk to us. I could have said this stuff to him, but he already had a crowd round him and I decided to go home. But it's to the show's credit that as I cycled home, I felt like a heel for foreclosing the dialogue.

I liked this show immensely and David Overend has done wonderful things with an admirably light touch. I kind of disagreed with it more and more as it went on, but that's surely good. It provoked me and I can feel there's a rather jumpy defensive quality to what I've written here. It's got under my skin. It's in the round, which feels right and democratic. There's a hexagon structure suspended above the stage that refers to the bees that one of the figures in the story keeps, but also suggests 'hive mind'. It reminded me of a number of shows that have that same indeterminate mixture of reality and fiction, the story sitting on a borderline of comedy and darkness, that tone of amiable despair. I think of Daniel Kitson, obviously, but also the podcast S-Town. There are just touches of Tim Crouch in the riddling theatrical playfulness. The show is superimposed somewhat on the Mosquitoes set. This feels appropriate because it gives the show a pleasingly provisional quality; it resists the monolithic. It is a quietly profound piece of theatre.

Mosquitoes

One of the things I love about Lucy Kirkwood is that she never repeats herself. None of her plays are like each other. Chimerica is nothing like Tinderbox is nothing like it felt empty when the heart went... is nothing like NSFW is nothing like The Children is nothing like Mosquitoes. There are some motifs that run through the plays - moments of desperate moral choice, people living with their own terrible decisions, relations between the old and the young, a feminist vein running through everything - but really, if you'd seen Chimerica, would you have guessed that the same woman wrote NSFW? And I think that's an admirable thing. Kirkwood has a restless talent; she pushes herself with everything she writes. This is exposing, of course; the risks of failure suddenly flare up bold and bright when you start with a new dramatic form.

Interestingly (if I haven't imagined this), but this actually seems something more typical of women playwrights this century than men. Moira Buffini's plays are virtually unrecognisable one to another. Lucy Prebble goes somewhere entirely new with each play. There are perhaps some stylistic echoes between Alice Birch's plays, but the forms and structures and tones are always new. Maybe it's the influence of our great dramaturgical shape-shifter, Caryl Churchill, who has never written the same play twice, who invents extraordinary new structures and techniques and then never uses them again. There are echoes of Churchill in Kirkwood (as there are in virtually anyone decent writing now). Last year, I bookended my theatregoing with Churchill's Escaped Alone and Kirkwood's The Children, a beautiful (though, I'm sure, inintentional) pairing about old age, England, and terrible calamity, both marked by surprising and heart-stopping moments of music and deep personal pain.

So what's the new one? Mosquitoes is set over three years between 2006 and 2009. Jenny and Alice are sisters. Alice is a physicist who lives in Geneva for most of the play, where she works in the CERN Laboratory on the Large Hadron Collider. Jenny, on the other hand, is a sarcy, funny, wastrel who believes what she reads on the internet. When we first meet her she is pregnant but later we discover that as a result of her refusal to give her new child the MMR vaccine, the girl dies of a preventable disease. She visits Alice in Geneva, where Alice's son, Luke, is having difficulties in his Swiss school, forlornly pursuing a girl, living on his computer, and getting into fights. At one point he runs away and Alice is frantic. Meanwhile Jenny is on a downward spiral of self-destruction. When Luke returns, but is humiliated by his would-be girlfriend, who sends his cock pic around the school. He sends a virus into the CERN network, via his mum's laptop, but Jenny takes the blame. This leads to a near-final rupture between the sisters, but a year later they appear possibly on the path to reconciliation at Jenny reveals she is pregnant again.

The tone of this one is deceptive. It starts very light, very funny, but it gets darker and more alarming, mining comedy out of pain, but also pain out of the comedy. There are also science lectures, of a sort, about the end of the world and alternative universes. Jenny's character is particularly interesting (it made me think a little about Mary in Common which I saw last night); initially she is lovably scatty and enjoyably caustic, but her waywardness has terrible consequences and her behaviour becomes reckless, self-destructive and also just destructive. The smiles freeze on our faces. The loss of children haunts this play, a metaphor perhaps for the indeterminacy of our physical microverse (Heisenberg is mentioned at one point): in all of our lives we either know how fast we're travelling or where we're going but never at the same time, which makes our wanderings so hard to control. And there is something elegantly simple but also resonant in the central presence of the LHC, ramming these protons at each other and hoping to produce some invisible other particle, that suggests the way that our orderly lives may just be chaotic collisions of unpredictable people, but also that through all the chaos there is the regularity of something produced, be it love, be it the Higgs Boson.

But also, and I apologise for the crass way I'm going to say it, but this is also one of the first really powerful plays about Brexit and Trump. This is a play about our terrible ability to believe plausible lies, the way a lurking irrationality can have us all replicate and pass on nonsense just because on some egoistic level, it feels like it should be right. More literally we have Trump's contempt for the climate scientists (it's all just opinion) and Gove's disregard of experts. In a way, the visions of catastrophe in this play (we are given six scenarios for the end of the universe) seem also fearful visions, on a more domestic level, of the consequences of our electrostatic attraction to the lie. Various kinds of nonsense ripple through the play: praying, crystals, pseudo-science, horoscopes, innumeracy, racism, dementia, and Andrew Wakefield's cruel campaign against MMR The play swims in a world of lies: even at the turning on of the LHC, we see a reporter ask the scientists if there's a risk that it will create a black hole that will destroy the earth. But these are the waters we, too, swim in. This year we're drowning in them.

It's a very fine production, with a superb cast, led magnificently by Olivia Coleman (hilarious, wicked, desperate) and Olivia Williams (cool, elegant, fragile, desperate). Rufus Norris keeps things moving beautifully, the play, in the round, vaguely suggesting an atom, without making too much of that. There are hints of Frayn's Copenhagen, of Payne's Constellations, and of Haddon/Stephens's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime in the play and the production. Amanda Boxer is the two women's mother is particular fine, a dignified (but deluded?) long-suffering woman, sensing a gradual and permanent decline of her mind.

It's a hugely enjoyable play and yet quietly shattering at moments. The play is at its best when the two sisters are on stage together, not just because of the performances, but because here, I think, is where the writing is most heartfelt. And it's also where the writing is funniest; the opening scene is just breathlessly funny. And there are some wonderful moments, particularly for Jenny, who is an unforgivably brilliant creation and a total pain. There's a marvellous scene (SPOILER ALERT) where she talks to Luke who has just discovered his viral humiliation: Jenny asks to look at the picture so she can assess how embarrassing this is. Her response - 'Okay, so that's a great cock' - is so wonderfully inappropriate, so complicated (does she mean it or is she making it up to make him feel better? which would be even worse) and yet works so well. And there's another, smaller moment that moved me to tears. The scientists have found a way to turn the data on the higgs boson into sound and there's a competition to turn this sound into music. Alice asks Luke to have a go - he's good with computers and music. Initially he refuses, but later, in an almost wordless scene, we see him give the headphones to his mother and she listens, only half trusting him, only half getting it, but moved nonetheless.

There are things I wasn't sure about. I think the science imagery is quite diffuse and varied, which tends to have a centrifugal effect on the play, though I held onto the bits that touched me and stored away the other stuff to think about later. I got slightly lost around Luke's disappearance, not entirely sure how long he'd been missing, nor why Alice doesn't know he's back, when the whole school has just received a photo of his cock; and then it seemed odd to me that Alice needles him so quickly when you'd think she'd just be relieved to have him home. I noted that in the script, she begins the second half with a long speech about the end of the world. Presumably to balance the two halves (and not make, cardinal sin, the second half longer than the first), the speech has been moved to the end of the first half. This seems to me a mistake. Kirkwood's instincts are right about where to take the interval and the force of that speech is compromised in its new position.

It's a ferocious, funny and moving play. Lucy Kirkwood is writing prolifically right now but, like Heisenberg's electron, we can know her velocity, but not her direction. I can't wait to see where she goes next.

Common

I've been living abroad for a year and a half and have felt very unplugged from British theatre. Indeed, after we had our first baby a year ago, I've felt pretty unplugged from all theatre. But we got back on Monday and tonight I saw my first theatre show for some months: Common by D C Moore.

Now, don't get me wrong: I wasn't so unplugged that I'd heard nothing about the furore attached to this production. I'd heard there were some terrible  reviews, rumours of walkouts, cancelled previews, last-minute major surgery on the play and the production, a small firestorm of user comments on Time Out. But I didn't really engage too much with that. I didn't read any of the reviews. I couldn't actually find the user comments when I briefly tried to look, and it's not as if cancelled previews are unprecedented at the National. That's part of what previews are for.

So I went in kind of fresh, maybe with a small warning bell that this might be a tough evening. But what can I tell you, dear reader? I don't know if the production's just grown into its own skin or the detractors are all dimwits, but Common is a fantastic play, given a roaring and thrilling production by Jeremy Herrin.

What's it about? Oh Jesus, don't ask me. Loosely, we're in the early nineteenth century and Mary has returned to the rural common lands where she grew up. She is seeking the girl she loved before faking her own death and fleeing. But changes are afoot; specifically, the enclosure movement is going full throttle - the common land is being privatised. This is creating considerable tension both between the peasantry and the newly-landed gentry but also between different peasant factions: the English and Irish, protestants and catholics. Mary is blessed with a gift for mind-reading (probably) and for mischief (certainly) and she starts by twisting the locals around her finger. But she stirs up more tension than is good for her because her lover rejects her and the peasantry, in a strange rural ceremony, bury her alive. She survives this, miraculously, and is brought into the house of the local Lord, with whom she forms an unlikely alliance. She confronts her lover again and they seem to kill each other, though, again, Mary survives and now rules the manor house. She is on top and it seems her mixture of mischief and cruelty will be the making of our world too.

If that seems a little strange, well that's because it is. It's a very strange play, full of wickedly perverse ideas and images: a dead dog, a dead crow carrying the soul of a dead father, a countryside rite, endless reaping and hoeing, sapphic passions, incestuous passions, several deaths and rebirths, and always, everywhere the land, the land. The Olivier stage is covered in earth and we feel the failing of the harvest throughout. It's (literally) earthy and this anchors the writing. It's a production that could inflame your hay fever. In fact it did inflame my hay fever.

D C Moore has created a new theatrical language for this play. It's not trying exactly to represent historical period, but rather to give a sense of a whole different world. The language is coarse and poetic, funny and visceral. It's a staggering achievement and it's remarkably sustained the whole way through. Just listen to this lovely stuff:

The Cock Inn. I know madam, I know. A gentleman's inn at the far-roughest edge of this wideParish, that no gentleman is ever in, unless it's all changes these allyears since. But go we must: Destiny demands it. No, I do. And my quest. Oh yes you don't know yet my Name or Intent. You'll learn both, in the soonbloody mists of time. Just mean later, madam. In a bit. But do remember, please: rest not your faith on a single syllable I heretell. Unless you cannot resist me, which I'll allunderstand. You are not, as I have been all too-long: alone.

That mixture of music hall, of neologism, of dirty joke and tugging emotion, the storytelling and the world-building, but all of it totally theatrical. (Say it out loud if you don't believe me. It's language that moves the air - and in fact I think that's a phrase from the play.) I think the critics who have slagged this off can have no idea how bloody difficult it is to create a style like this and sustain it without it turning into self-indulgent word-mush. This play is full-throated and theatrical and funny (god it's funny).

What's it about? I'll be honest, only just got home, haven't had time to process it really, I might have a better idea in a week or so. But I like that. There are puzzles in the play: what Mary's real 'Intent' is. She starts absolutely as our heroine and guide, but as it goes on she seems less and less reliable and more and more sinister. What we are to do with that complexity is part of the fun of watching this play. It reminded me a lot of Howard Barker in the 1980s: those scenes where characters that we have come to like do something unconscionably vile to shake off any affection and make us ask hard questions about how easily we take sides, the clichéd barbarism of our morality. I also liked the way the play seems to be about the enclosures (and it is, a bit) but it's much more complex and epic and it shows huge sweeps of characters and the effects of not just putting up a few fences but the entire mindset that was changing right through the eighteenth century. It utterly resists the urge to be narrow. 

I mentioned Barker and actually the play really took me back to that wave of plays from the early seventies to the mid-eighties, those epic historical plays that mix poetry and dirt, politics and laughter. Particularly those plays with a kind of rural element to them that seem to draw something from that earth that is somehow not wholly rational to make the language dance. I'm thinking of Storey's Cromwell, Bond's Bingo or The Fool, Barnes's Red Noses, Brenton's The Romans in Britain, Churchill's Fen, Barker's Victory or The Castle, Robert Holman's Other Worlds, almost anything by David Rudkin. It's not like the more recent rural plays like Stuart Paterson's King of the Fields, Richard Bean's Harvest, or Jez Butterworth's Night Heron, The Winterling or Jerusalem. Paterson and Bean's plays don't have quite the same magic; Butterworth's have the magic but not the scale. These latter plays are partly about a domesticated countryside, seen cautiously, at one remove. This just goes for it. I've not seen a play go for it like this for a long time.

The cast is wonderful. Cush Jumbo (the ex-lover) is, as always, magnetic, somehow both elegant and ferocious. I absolutely adored Lois Chimimba as Eggy Tom, a lad who carries his father's soul in a crow around with him, and enjoyably seems sometimes to see us watching the play (who then seems to be reincarnated as a chamber maid with aspirations). Tim McMullan is funny and sinister, scary and pitiful as the syphilitic English Lord. Brian Doherty, Trevor Fox and John Dalgleish are superb as various members of the warring factions. But Anne-Marie Duff, oh dear God, this is such a fierce, funny, sexy, scary performance. She plays it like Shakespeare in a way, in the sense that she's putting a whole world on stage and doing so with delicacy and poetry, but it's completely lived and present. Glenda Jackson once said that Howard Barker's plays had 'writing you can taste in the mouth'. That's what this is and the joy is seeing Anne-Marie Duff dancing with it. The production is pretty great and I'd like to single out Paule Constable's lighting, which is just breathtaking in the use of dramatic side lighting, the occasional flashes of colour, and the versatile use of the cyc so that characters are sometimes reduced to shadow puppets or multiplied spectrally in shadow.

No it's not perfect. What ever is? There are some things that maybe don't quite mesh. Most difficult is the second half. Looking quickly at the published text, it looks as though there have been some pretty savage cuts inflicted on the second half. And I can see why; there's a certain level of complication that repeats the rhythmic patterns of the first half which would seem to slow the whole thing down: we want to get to some kind of moment of clarity or of striking climactic complexity and the play is probably a bit long. But, cutting for pace, they've disrupted the internal rhythm of several scenes, and occasionally I felt we were watching a kind of 'highlights' version of the second half, so quickly was plot spilling out over the stage. This tension between pace and rhythm is always there; it's a little bit a tension between art and entertainment and a bit of that tension is a good thing. Here it feels like pace won out but I'd have liked more faith in the rhythm.

And the production,. while good, feels oddly reserved about the Olivier. In particular, I sometimes kept wanting to pull the action a foot or two nearer us. The actors hugged the middle and rear of the stage a little. I wondered if this was directorial - Duff being the only one permitted far downstage because it gives her that privileged access to us. Maybe, maybe not. I think it would be wrong anyway, just Anne-Marie Duff's turn of the head and that cheeky crooked smile is another to single her out for us.

But these are quibbles. Common is great. Please give it a go.