Love the Sinner

This is a fluent, engaging play about the relation between faith and life; is faith the foundation of a life or a bandage on it? This is worked out at the personal level through Michael, who is a Church volunteer who has a sexual encounter with a young African man while working for a delegation in Africa. He attempts to smooth over the contradictions between his private homosexuality and barely-manageable public heterosexuality by lurching further into evangelical Christianity which displeases his wife, his colleagues, and, it seems, the Church. Through him, the play’s asking whether faith guides us in how to act or whether it is a means of personal self-oppression.

On the geo-political level, the play begins with related questions being asked at a meeting of a delegation, trying to draft a statement on homosexuality on behalf of the worldwide Anglican communion that can satisfy both the liberals in the American church and the traditionalists in the African church. The scene asks whether any faith can possibly smooth over these fundamental contradictions of belief.

It’s a good topical issue. I’m not sure what the play is saying, precisely, because there are some lurches of character development that left me a bit confused. Michael initially seemed fairly practised at anonymous sexual encounters though he was so quickly rattled that I presumed this may have been a first time. He is unnerved - who wouldn’t be? - to discover that Joseph (the young African guy) has literally turned up on his doorstep but a scene later he is bringing him food and encouraging him to live in the church basement. At the end of the play, Michael has refused to go and testify with Joseph and Joseph goes up alone; why, I’m not sure.

The star of the show is the dialogue which is overlapping, interrupting, often very funny, and capturing some of the energy in these debates. He’s generated some new typography to indicate this which actually makes the page very hard to read: a welter of columned text, /, *, **, and ^. The production team seem to have figured it out though because the effect is mainly seamless. Just once or twice a choreographed uproar seems rehearsed because of the lack of any similar interventions before it.

In fact, the actual star of the show is Jonathan Cullen as Michael who I remember vividly from Robert Holman’s Rafts and Dreams at the Theatre Upstairs twenty years ago, where he was performing a similarly halting and hypernaturalistic role. (I remember thinking as I watched it that I’d never seen such naturalistic acting in my life.) Here he’s stammering, awkward, given to bursts of messianic enthusiasm, cringing postcolonial fear, and, at one memorable moment, desperately failed attempt at arousal. Fiston Barek’s Joseph is impressive too, switching in a moment between charming gracefulness and vengeful threats.

The structure of the play is 5 scenes. The first is a large ensemble scene. Scenes 2 and 3 are largely two-handers. Scene 4 is a small ensemble that becomes a two-hander. Scene five is mainly a 4-hander. The scenes are located in a conference room in a posh African hotel; a bedroom in the same hotel; Michael’s living room with his wife Shelly; an office in Michael’s workplace; and the basement of Michael’s local church. I would the events cover around six months but I’m not sure.

There are a couple of clunky bits of plotting. When Joseph comes in to deliver coffee in scene one, the delegates are told to close their eyes becomes they are supposed to be sequestered and have no contact with outsiders during their discussions. This principle is followed to the letter but not the spirit since at least two of the characters engage in fairly substantial conversation with Joseph. It seems more likely that it’s there so that the characters won’t immediately recognise him in scene 5 though that itself doesn’t really seem necessary. (Who’d necessarily recognise a hotel porter, six months later?)

It does create one of a series of telling images that centre each scene. In scene 1 it’s all the churchmen and women standing with their eyes closed; in scene 3 a Bible is thrown across a room; in scene 4 Michael attempts to have sex with Shelly on a table covered in religious printwork; in scene 5, Joseph and three churchmen sit around a nursery school table on nursery school chairs. In 1 and 5, there’s something witty about the unsuitedness of the church to the present world. In 3 & 4, it’s a clash between faith and desire.

I was intrigued to see how sympathetic Michael was. You might have thought that the atmosphere of colonialist exploitation, his being a rather fervent Christian, and a businessman, and a closeted gay man would be enough to make him a figure of derision but, helped by Cullen’s strong performance, you feel for him for the most part.

Oh, of course

I have passed over the Rubicon. I have crossed the floor. Depending on your own allegiances, I have seen the light or I have joined the dark side. I own, not before time, a Mac.

This has been a very long time coming. Indeed, a couple of my friends that I’ve mentioned my new Mac to (who am I kidding? I’ve told everybody) have been surprised I don’t have one already. It’s true that a lot of people in theatre have them. I guess this is because of the look - beautiful - and the operating system - intuitive - and the reliability - high.

It’s quite a big deal for me. I got my first PC in 1990, a Packard Bell desktop which, despite the legendary reputation of that company, was certainly the most reliable computer I’ve ever owned. I had it for around five years until I could no longer run new software. Even so, as I passed it onto the computer technician for scrap, he mused, ‘no it’s not very up-to-date but it is still many times more powerful than the computer that powered the Moon landing’.

My mum always worked in computers and often brought computers home. I word-processed our school annual (orange flickering letters on a black screen, the monitor moulded into a single unit that contained the hard drive and keyboard - man, it was futuristic). I also had a typewriter in my room so have always typed and I think at the speed I type, not the speed I write, with the result that I’ve never written anything substantial in longhand.

As a result when I got my PC in 1990, I was a quick study. I learned WordPerfect - for which I still have fondness but no longer the will to keep up with - and became expert in pretty much everything it did. In fact, that was pretty much all I used the computer for; a Word Processor and filing system. On subsequent computers and laptops (I think my MacBook Pro one is something like my eighth regular computer?) I branched into Excel, PowerPoint and of course email. The internet arrived in the mid 90s and games and graphics in the late 90s. I use my computer all day every day, pretty much. I write on it, I learn on it, I listen to radio and watch TV on it, I communicate on it, I shop on it. When I don’t shop on it, I have been known to write shopping lists on it.

So I’m very learned-intuitive with Windows and MS Office. I have found my computer annoying but those bits of software seem fine to me. I know where everything goes and how to do whatever I want. I expected the step into the MacWorld to be a wrench regardless of what everyone said.

But what I’m finding is that each time I discover the new way of doing something familiar, my instinctive reaction is ‘oh of course’. Almost everything in the Mac that’s new to me feels like somehow I knew it already. How do you put pictures into a single event in iPhoto? You drag one on top of another. Oh of course. How do you add a photo in iWeb? Just drag it onto the placeholder and it automatically fits. Oh of course. How do you scroll down in Safari. You stroke the trackpad downward with two fingers, sensuously beckoning the rest of the page. Oh of course, of course.

I’m stunned to find myself adjusting to quickly and enthusiastically to the new machine. I knew I’d love it; I knew I’d find it beautiful. I’d technoperved over Mac products before and I still regard my first-generation iPhone one of the loveliest things I have ever seen. And some of the way I found myself ‘naturally’ pinching in, swiping from side to side, pushing and prodding the screen around prepared me for the step over to Mac. It does seem to be a machine designed for kinetic learners, for people who enjoy a sensuous interaction with the world.

Oh and for what it’s worth it’s a 17” MacBook Pro, with a 2.53GHz Core i5 processor, 8GB 1066MHz memory, and a 500GB hard disk. It’s lovely.

Posh

Laura Wade’s new play, Pos​h, opened in the middle of the election campaign, as intended, as a minor intervention in that process. Set during one evening in the dining room of a rural pub-restaurant, it followed the ‘Riot Club’ in their arcane rituals as they drink and eat to excess and then smash the room up. It’s based loosely on the Bullingdon Club at Oxford, whose former members include the current Mayor of London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister. Any club that produced the three most powerful politicians in England is worth examining and I’ve been looking forward to it.

The play takes place in the private dining room of The Bull’s Head, a hotel-pub-restaurant in rural Oxfordshire. The action covers around four hours on a Saturday evening, with two ellipses as we go from pre-meal to end of starters, then from main meal to pudding. There’s also a prologue and an epilogue, a couple of weeks before and after the main action, I would guess. The cast comprises ten (male) members of the club; the owner of the hotel and his daughter; a (female) escort; and an older Tory grandee, only seen in the prologue and epilogue. The play formally set out as a two-act play.

We meet Guy, a second-year Oxford undergraduate meeting Jeremy, a wealthy high-Tory friend of his father. Guy is disappointed in his experience of the Riot Club, which does not seem to have the extremes of behaviour than Jeremy recalls. Guy plans to challenge the current president, James Leighton-Masters. Then the Club assembles and we discover that various members are jostling for position, having arranged various extreme courses and other ‘entertainments’ (Harry has booked a high-class prostitute, whom he naively imagines will happily agree to sucking them all off under the table). The evening descends fairly quickly into drunkenness, vomiting, occasional doggerel poetry and constant bantering. They clumsily flirt with Rachel, the proprietor’s daughter. Finally they smash the room up but when the owner protests, rather than meekly accepting a blank cheque, they attack him very violently. Alistair is chosen by the group to be their scapegoat. Some time later, we see Alistair talking to Jeremy; he thinks the Club should be disbanded, arguing that the superiority of his class is something that should be stripped of its irrelevant traditions but pursued ruthlessly. This impresses Jeremy who maps out a healthy future of the young man in the Party.

It’s a good play. The dialogue is ripe and funny and fluent. The sheer foulness of the attitudes expressed is all too convincing. The production was tremendous; a real ensemble performance with some wonderful entr’actes as the Riot Clubbers perform a capella and in their fruitiest accents modern bling classics like ‘Wearin’ my Rolex’ and ‘Dance Wiv Me’. What’s so exquisitely timed about the play is that you roar with horrified laughter at the antics of these fucking shits and then you remember that these fucking shits are now running the country. Wade’s found a number of ways of making a meal into a story; there are rivalries between the members to succeed, or maybe even supplant, the current president of the Club. These efforts, including a ridiculous last-days-of-Rome course at the meal, and a catastrophic booking of a prostitute, are tied to the formal organisation of the meal, which is dramatically neat.

There are some intensifications of the ritual; the oaths, the rules, the costumes - which at one point flare into further life with the arrival of the ghost of the Club’s founder - and there are games and forfeits galore. This makes the play continually watchable, oiled smoothly by bitingly horrible dialogue and characters.

Two small reservations.

First: I met a friend in the interval who asked me what I thought and I said I was enjoying it but that also I just felt like someone was repeatedly ramming my face in shit. I never quite lost that feeling. It is funny; but the funnier it is, the less funny it really is. I’m not Billington, I don’t want the play to sternly offer a punchy moral to the story, but I did wonder how sharply the political point of it all had been drawn.

Second, there was a bit of a punchy moral to the ending. The (slightly less persuasive) bit of the story had the Riot Club turn on the owner of the pub, kicking him half to death. Then they choose a scapegoat to take the rap. In the final scene a Tory grandee whom we’ve met at the beginning of the play meets the chosen scapegoat. This young man has been the most extreme advocate of aristocratic privilege and of cutting loose from the mob. In a rather conspiratorial scene, the grandee listens to some of his ideas - even though they include disbanding the Riot Club - and offers to have the charges dropped and, after a brief career in finance, will welcome him into the Tory Party, where, it is suggested, a consitutency and perhaps seat in Cabinet will be waiting for him. The important part of this scene is that the young posh thug’s belief that they should get rid of the absurd trappings of aristocratic entitlement and elitism is intended to remind us of David Cameron’s renewal of the Conservatives. The suggestion seems to be that the New Tories are still the Old Tories, blue in tooth and claw.

I don’t doubt that the Tory party has literally and figuratively covered up crimes, but this seemed to reduce a rather more multiple anatomisation of upper-class masculinity in the first part of the play and a political analysis of the Cameroons to a crudely reductive point. Without the violent attack, I’m pretty sure the play would have worked fine (maybe the sheer pointlessness of the cost, the food, the drinking, the vandalism would have been its own accusation) - but then perhaps Laura Wade feared it the play would run out of dramatic steam. I think she could have kept her nerve and refused to point such a clear moral. If we didn’t think the behaviour was foul throughout and noticed the links between the Bullingdon Club and the Tory Party’s commanding heights, I’m not sure the ending was going to help.

The moment when the founder of the Riot club appears - Earl Riot (or Ryot as we later discover - the whole ethos of the club has derived from a misspelling) is interesting but half-hearted; he says all the things that Alistair will say in the final scene, so it’s not clear why the break from realism is happening. This may have just been unclear in the production.

Finally, though, a probably patronising and stupid point. It’s a really amazing play to see by a woman. Not that women can’t write like this (I’m thinking of some of Serious Money) but this, hard on the heels of Enron, is once again breaking down some of the dramaturgical barriers between men and women. These two plays - the economic documentary play and the lads’ night out play - have been rather annexed by the guys in recent years. It’s also pretty surprising coming from Laura Wade whose plays have seemed to me fairly gentle. Yes it’s probably a patronising position, but I was very struck and cheered by it.