When whistle-blowing American soldier Bradley Manning was found guilty
of espionage at the end of July, the old ideals of truth, justice and
the American way suddenly seemed like more of a hollow mockery than
ever before. It also made The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning, Tim
Price's dramatic rendering of Manning's story for National Theatre
Wales, look like the most pertinent play on the planet.
When NTW first presented John E McGrath's production, it was in the
Welsh school that Manning attended. For their Fringe run they do
something similar, with the noises off and camouflage-clad figures
occupying classrooms as the audience enter suggesting something a lot
stronger than mere playground stuff. Once seated on four sides of the
school's echoey assembly area, the audience witness Manning's course
from a displaced childhood between small-town Wales and America, as a
bullied gay computer geek came to develop a disrespect for authority
that would eventually bring about his downfall.
Price does this by flitting between time-zones, from the little
classroom protests that shaped Manning, to the stateside McJobs he
seemed destined for, to his father refusing to pay him through college,
and to Baghdad, where the grunts watched murders of civilians on their
laptops as if they were video games. By having all six performers play
Manning at various points, passing his glasses between them like a
weapon, it suggests a common cause in which anyone could have done what
he did.
All of this is energetically realised in a production which might well
be NTW's Black Watch moment. Indeed, one can't help but note the odd
stylistic nod to the National Theatre of Scotland's most popular show
to date. McGrath and his team take things other ways, however, and
when, with seemingly nothing to lose, Manning does leak the thousands
of documents, it's with his head-phones on, as his action becomes as
liberating and euphoric as a night surrounded by drag queens on the
dancefloor of a gay disco. The documents themselves are thrown into the
air like bunting at Mardi-gras.
The stark message that Manning may be about to be imprisoned for the
rest of his life for telling the truth, is the starkest of come-downs
in this vital piece of work, which every American politician should be
frog-marched to see post-haste.
Until August 25th
When Joseph Conrad published his novel, The Secret Agent, in 1907,his
tale of a reluctant agent provocateur who becomes embroiled in an
anarchist plot to blow up Greenwich Observatory was an early example of
the political thriller. In the post 9/11 age, it looks like even more
of a template for the long-term effects of random acts of terrorism.
In Theatre O's hands, Conrad's story becomes something else again, as
the company debunk any kind of straight literary adaptation in favour
of a melting pot of post-modern vaudeville. Opening with the company
inviting the audience to take a peek into their Cabinet of Desire,
things eventually open out to the main story, in which Verloc becomes
an agent for mysterious 'foreign powers.' At home with his wife and
family, all seems normal, but when things go horribly wrong, Verloc's
life literally blows up in his face.
Joseph Alford's production, devised with his cast of five and scripted
by Matthew Hurt, fuses Victorian music hall, silent movie melodrama and
magic lantern moodiness to make for something which initially appears
charming but slights. As it slow-burns its way to an ending in which
the waste of human life for a higher cause is brought tragically home,
The Secret Agent becomes a darkly imagined catalogue of all the madness
and despair it can muster.
Until August 25th
Before Eddie Argos became lead singer with smarty-pants alt-pop combo,
Art Brut, and before Amy Mason became a writer and performer, they went
out with each other as teenagers, living it up in a grotty bed-sit
straight out of a kitchen-sink novel. At some point in 1999, they ran
away for a cheap holiday in a B&B on the Isle of Wight, before breaking
up and going on to live very different lives.
Nearly fifteen years on, Mason and Argos have returned to the scene of
the crime by way of this quite lovely lo-fi musical, which charts a
rites of passage that moves between Mason's angsty adolescence and
Argos' utter fecklessness in a dead-end town where mix-tapes, Top of
the Pops and indie discos are the only salvation.
Moving between Mason's spoken-word monologues and Argos' equally naked
songs that counterpoints her version of events with his own, this is as
raw as it gets in a charmingly low-key rites of passage that's both
poignant and funny. Where Mason is deadpan in her delivery,
Argos,accompanied by Jim Moray on guitar, is expansive and needy.
Opposites attract indeed in this lovely little show that lays bare a
set of dog-eared but still cherished postcards from a very English
indie-pop romance.
Until August 25th
The Herald, August 14th 2013
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