5/11, Festival Theatre, Chichester **** <br/> The Scarlet Letter, Minerva Theatre, Chichester ***
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Your support makes all the difference.It's clear from the title that Edward Kemp's 5/11 does not intend to treat us to a straightforward drama about the Gunpowder Plot. Instead, it views 1605 in the light of September 11 2001 and beyond. The result is a thought-provoking play-for-today, staged with enormous flair by Steven Pimlott in a production that skilfully deploys a company of 20-odd actors and negotiates with aplomb the jumps of tone from the skittish to the serious.
The script crawls with calculated anachronisms: these Jacobeans plagiarise lines by the likes of Brecht and Rupert Brooke, and use yet-to-be-coined terms such as "terrorism". At one point, Sir Robert Cecil likens his tulips to "an army of imams in their turbans". But the play does not make the crude claim that Roman Catholics were the Islamic extremists of this era. It's more the case that we get a fresh perspective on our current problems from the way that 5/11 demonstrates that this is not the first time that angry young men of an alienated minority have turned to murder in the name of religion.
The play declines to be partisan. We sympathise with the Catholics when the hopes of toleration in the new reign are dashed because the exchequer - which is being bankrupted by the extravagances of James I (amusingly caricatured by Alistair McGowan) - needs the money that will be brought in by re-imposing the recusancy tax. We register that, for ruthless cunning, the plotters are more than matched by the Jacobean establishment. But does this justify Stephen Noonan's fanatical Catesby and his bunch of extremists in the belief that they are God's chosen instruments, who thereby have leave to blow up the innocent as well as the guilty?
Next door in the Minerva Studio, we move from the Catholic to the Puritan conscience of more than 300 years ago, and to another fine example of history filtered through a modern sensibility. Phyllis Nagy's adaptation of The Scarlet Letter offers an incisive deconstruction of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel.
This story of stigma and hypocrisy is thrown into shrewd, feminist relief here by a punk-haired adult version of Pearl (Katherine Tozer), the love-child of Elizabeth McGovern's steadfast Hester Prynne.
Both shows to 8 September (01243 781312)
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