The Week on Stage, from Jack Absolute Flies Again to Hungry
A guide to the week’s theatre
Questions of patriotism and national pride are explored in wildly different ways this week.
The National Theatre’s big new comedy Jack Absolute Flies Again pokes fun at twee, upper-class British nostalgia, while Peter Morgan’s Patriots at the Almeida explores the life of Boris Berezovsky and the evolution of post-Soviet Russia. Elsewhere, Chris Bush’s hot streak continues with her new play, Hungry.
Come back next week when our critics will be battling the heatwave to bring you their verdicts, among others, on the National’s Much Ado About Nothing and a revival of Patrick Marber’s Closer at the Lyric.
Jack Absolute Flies Again – National Theatre ★★★★☆
One Man, Two Guvnors casts a long shadow. Richard Bean’s 2011 comedy, a pastiche of Goldoni’s 18th-century play Servant of Two Masters, turned James Corden into an international star and was declared one of the funniest shows the National Theatre had ever staged. A decade on, Bean has teamed up with actor Oliver Chris – an original cast member of Two Guvnors – to rewrite Sheridan’s Restoration comedy, The Rivals. If it doesn’t entirely emerge from that shadow, there is a lot of ebullience in the endeavour.
Bean and Chris have moved the action forward to 1940. The setting: an RAF outpost at an English country house. The vibe: “chocks away!” There are clipped accents aplenty. Mark Thompson’s technicolour set is like a tourism poster for the English countryside, with linocut, verdant hills in the background. Laurie Davidson, banishing the memory of his appearance as Mr Mistoffelees in Cats, is the eponymous Jack Absolute, a fighter pilot posh boy whose father owns lots of land. He’s in love with Lydia Languish (Natalie Simpson), but she’s been reading about socialism and has taken a fancy to mechanic Dudley Scunthorpe (Kelvin Fletcher). “Tell me tales of what it’s like to be poor in the north!” she coos. Complicating matters further is maid Lucy (Kerry Howard, a comic highlight), who loves Dudley too.
How much you enjoy Jack Absolute may depend on your tolerance for luvvie humour; there are many winking, fourth-wall-breaking asides. An early onslaught of poo jokes, presumably the result of two blokes writing a play together and giving each other the giggles, should have been cut from the first draft. But what Bean and Chris are really interested in is lampooning the upper-class entitlement and outdated stereotypes around class, race and gender, which live on through a deceptively twee type of Keep Calm and Carry On British nostalgia. The show never quite says anything as smart as it might, but it does deliver on laughs. Its puckish refusal to be po-faced is part of its charm, so a solemn Blackadder Goes Forth-style twist at the end sits a little strangely. But when it doubles down on being a silly, rollicking, escapist comedy, it’s the giddiest night of theatre you’ll have all summer. Jessie Thompson
Patriots – Almeida ★★★☆☆
No one is having more fun in this heatwave than Tom Hollander. In Peter Morgan’s Patriots, playing the Russian oligarch turned political dissident Boris Berezovsky, he glowers. He grumps. He prances. He shouts. And he gives us one of the most compelling stage performances of the year so far.
Although written before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, Morgan’s play taps into current world events with masterful precision. The writer of The Crown and Frost/Nixon is an apt choice, too: he’s always been more interested in how power is acquired and built, and in the people who – whether by accident or design – have to wear it.
We begin by meeting Berezovsky, who was found dead in 2013 in an apparent suicide, as a young man. He’s a gifted mathematician but gives up the academic life to become a businessman and political kingmaker in a crucial era for his country. That he did a PhD in decision-making but became tortured by the choices he made is this play’s favourite metaphor. Early on, Berezovsky gets a phone call from a nobody deputy mayor called Vladimir Putin (Will Keen). Believing him to be malleable, he gives the future president a leg-up through the ranks that he later comes to regret.
Before we see Putin rise to power, characters in the play keep referring to him in patronising terms – a bit of a loser but basically seems like a decent guy. The joke becomes repetitive. But as a study of the making of a tyrant, and those who are implicated along the way, it may be exactly the kind of thought exercise we are all craving right now. But what you want to see is Hollander. His Berezovsky stands perfectly still, craning his neck, looking around with crazed eyes, his fingers floating as though holding an invisible orb. He plays him as a man who knows he’s always the cleverest person in the room, and therefore even more pained by his outmanoeuvring. It’s never quite clear if he has been motivated by principles or self-interest. That’s the beauty of Hollander’s performance: it gives us so much but ultimately remains unknowable. JT
Hungry – Soho Theatre ★★★★☆
Hungry is delicious. And since the latest show from playwright-of-the-mo Chris Bush is a love story full of food, indulge me a few more metaphors. The pacy, flirty dialogue: frothy as freshly whipped egg whites. But when things spiral and the doomed relationship between chef Lori and waiter Bex implodes, the play is as sticky and dark as treacle.
“I’ll never buy you flowers because flowers are pointless,” Lori (Eleanor Sutton) tells Bex (Melissa Lowe). “But I will bake for you, any hour of the day or night. I’d watch you eat. I’d eat you up.” But Bush’s show isn’t just a workplace romance between a waiter and chef. Give it five minutes and it’s morphed into something bigger, hinting at themes of race, class and cultural appropriation.
Initially, Lori is awkward and jittery, constantly taking the bait of Bex’s confident teasing. As their relationship blossoms, the power dynamics change again. When Bex finally lets her rage out, Lowe crushes crisp multipacks in her hand and bursts bags of off-brand Wotsits under her Doc Martens. It’s an unforgettable image.
But it’s Bush’s script, and her way of talking about love and food and sex, that powers the couple forward. Through Bex, she conjures grand metaphors of beds made out of mountains of bread and butter, hinting at an obsession with eating that will be instantly recognisable to anyone who’s ever struggled themselves. References to eating disorders of all kinds are handled delicately. Hungry is considerate – yet not without bite. Isobel Lewis
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