Section:GDN 1N PaGe:61 Edition Date:190907 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/9/2019 15:03 cYanmaGentaYellowbl
Saturday 7 September 2019 The Guardian •
61When a character in Simon Woods’s
play claims that the great mystery
of our time is “the insatiable desire
of the people of this country to
be fucked by an Old Etonian”, the
audience lets out a roar of approval.
But, while Woods’s play is funny,
pleasantly short (90 minutes) and
ultimately moving, it also has the
structural fl aws of a debut play.
In essence, we are watching
a Cotswold Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? The setting is the
Oxfordshire country home in May
1988 of a Tory junior minister,
Robin Hesketh (Alex Jennings ), and
his wife, Diana (Lindsay Duncan).
The moment he returns from a
trip to Leeds to do Any Questions,
verbal battle is joined and rarely
lets up. Robin attacks his wife’s
laziness, alcoholism and leftish
sympathies. She sneers at his
privileged background, deep-rooted
philistinism and enslavement to
Mrs Thatcher. Diana initially adored
Robin, she admits: “and the rest, as
they say, is tragedy.”
If the play owes a considerable
debt to Edward Albee , there are
also echoes of Private Lives in the
merciless banter. The big diff erence
is that both Albee and Coward
introduce a second couple to expose
the self- obsession of their sparring
twosomes; here, however, we
simply have Robin and Diana for
company, whose verbal jousting
acquires a circular quality. And
although the end is touching, it
is not accomplished without an
audible crashing of gears.
Woods, an actor himself, has the
capacity to write good dialogue,
and Simon Godwin ’s precise
production boasts two expert
performers in Jennings and Duncan.
Jennings has the trickier task in
that it is hard to sympathise with
his character’s air of misogynistic
entitlement. He is forever putting
down his wife, dislikes drama and
fi ction because “the people who
in real life contribute the absolute
least get all the sympathy”, and
takes predictable pot-shots at the
Guardian for its mix of “righteous
indignation and typographical
inaccuracy”. Yet Jennings suggests
that Robin’s patrician superiority
conceals a vulnerable, emotionally
wounded human being.
Duncan suggests, with great skill,
a woman who, denied a career in the
real world (but why in the 1980s?),
has turned inwards and developed
a talent for verbal laceration. She
attacks the “casual racism” of the
Tory party, questions a class system
in which it becomes “easy to mistake
an expensive education for an actual
understanding of the world”, and
thinks society would be improved
if Mrs Thatcher were taken to see
Hedda Gabler. Like Robin, Diana
experiences a sea change in the fi nal
moments, but one wishes Woods
had allowed us a glimpse of the
character’s hinterland much earlier.
In short, this is a promising
piece that shows Woods – who
himself went to Eton and Oxford- sabotaging a world of gilded
privilege. But he will write even
better plays when he realises that
drama does not depend on last-
minute revelations.
Michael Billington
What others said
“It has a certain what I might politely
call ‘fi rst playishness’ to it ... I found
it fairly stressful: Robin and Diana
simply tear smiling strips off each
other for the whole time.”
Andrzej Lukowski Time Out“Duncan begins the play with an
arsenal of irony and sarcasm,
giving voice to a kind of exasperated
pessimism. Slowly, her vulnerability
comes to the fore.”
Aleks Sierz TheArtsDesk.comTheatre
Hansard
Lyttelton, London
★★★☆☆
Who’s Afraid
of Virginia
Woolf for the
Cotswolds set
I have noticed the beginnings of
a welcome trend in television drama,
whereby the suff ering of women is
taking up more narrative time and
space – without being fetishised, as
has more often been the case until
recent years. Instead of using a
rape or murder or some other awful
violation as a mere plot point – often
allowing a jaded detective to shrug
off his detachment and enter the
sleuthing fray anew – increasingly
the se horrors are given due weight ,
and their impacts on the victim and
their loved ones are explored. They
are more and more often – from
one-off s such as Doing Money to
series such as the recent I Am ...
trilogy – the subject itself. The likes
of The Handmaid’s Tale, Big Little
Lies and Fleabag get much of the
glory and most of the headlines,
but it is this more subtle yet seismic
shift that off ers hope that there has
been a change in attitudes towards
which stories are worth telling and
which are not.
ITV’s new venture, the six-
part drama A Confession, is an
unexpected addition to this new
order. It is, after all, the dramatisation
of a true story that would play
perfectly as a tale of manly heroism:
how Det Supt Steve Fulcher
chose to breach police protocol to
catch a serial killer, and in doing
so sacrifi ced his own career and
reputation. But Jeff Pope has written
something so much more shaded
and satisfying, which honours the
experiences of those who lived
it. A Confession foregrounds and
fl eshes out the missing and their
families, while Fulcher and his
team’s painstaking police work
gradually assembles the horror that
will soon consume them all.
By the end of the opening
episode, we do not know that
there has been a murder at all. But
we know everything about the
ratcheting up of fear and dread in
a family when a loved one goes
missing. We watch the gradual
escalation of eff orts to fi nd 22-year-
old Sian O’Callaghan, from the
moment her mother takes the call
telling her that Kevin, Sian’s partner,
is worried because she didn’t come
home last night, through the ring-
round of friends and the calling of
hospitals to the offi cial report of
a missing person to the police andWhat others said
“A terrifi cally well written and acted,
and terribly sad, drama that gripped
with the inescapable pain experienced
by everyone involved in the case.”
Gerard O’Donovan Daily TelegraphTV
A Confession
ITV
★★★★☆A true crime
drama that
does justice
to its subjects
the eventual searching of CCTV
and Sav ernake Forest. And we see
the gradual, remorseless closing
down of avenues of possibility and
hope. No news from the friends.
No news from the hospital. A torn
pair of knickers in the forest and her
fi gure walking past a car on CCTV
and into oblivion.
And we know about another
family, too, who live with a diff erent
order of uncertainty and fear. Becky
Godden has gone missing and her
mother, Karen, hopes she will come
back for her birthday. She pins her
hopes on alleged sightings reported
by her grudging ex-husband and
visits – with sandwiches – to the
local street prostitutes to try to
keep any lines of communication
open. “She’s a tiny thing,” she tells
them. “Only 4ft 11. But she’ll tell you
she’s 5ft 3!” All of a mother’s love
and desperation in a single line – as
written, but also as delivered by
Imelda Staunton as Karen. Staunton
blend s rolling grief with a hint of the
fortitude she will show in the months
to come as it becomes evident her
daughter has not just run away this
time, and as she supports Fulcher
after his pivotal decision.
Staunton is part of a stellar cast
comprising actors who specialise
in bringing ordinary characters to
extraordinary life. Martin Freeman
( below ) plays Fulcher with quiet
authority, digging deeper into
himself with every twist of the
case. Siobhan Finneran as Sian’s
mother, Elaine, shows us the
uncommon courage of people in
uncommon circumstances. And,
as Kevin, Charlie Cooper gives a
fi ne performance that channels the
role in This Country that made him
famous, without repeating it.
It is a sad, ruthless dramatisation
of ruthlessly sad events, that asks
profound questions about how
we should obtain justice for the
murdered and missing. But the
missing have their presence, too,
and this is how it surely should be.
Lucy ManganIt’s a long way from Grimsby to
Tel Aviv. But Sacha Baron Cohen has
the singular distinction of playing
spies in both contrasting burgs.
In The Brothers Grimsby (2016) ,
he played alcoholic buff oon and
putative Grimbarian, Nobby, who,
despite being disguised as Liam
Gallagher, managed to assist his MI6
offi cer brother to foil a eugenicist
plot to rid the world of the working
classes. But only after the pair,
ostensibly hilariously, were obliged
to hide in an elephant’s vagina.
Three years later, Baron Cohen
stars in The Spy, Netfl ix’s new
six-part series written and directed
by Gideon Raff. Baron Cohen plays
Israel’s most famous spy, Eli Cohen,
who in the 60s went deep cover for
Mossad in Damascus to obtain Syrian
military secrets and thereby thwart
attacks on kibbutzim in Israel. And,
as it turns out, to suggest the planting
of eucalyptus trees that would
provide the air force with targets
as Israeli forces overran the Golan
Heights during 1967’s six-day war.
Is Baron Cohen really the right
guy to play an Israeli hero? Certainly,
when in an early scene his grows a
moustache that recalled his Kazakh
bonehead Borat , I wondered. But
Cohen has argued that he has
what it takes to play Agent 88.
He has previous for fooling the
world’s greatest minds while in
unconvincing disguises. Last yea r,
while posing as an Israeli army
offi cer, Col Erran Morad, for the
satirical series Who Is America? ,
got ex-veep Dick Cheney to sign his
“waterboarding kit”.
In The Spy, Eli becomes Kamel
Amin Thaabeth , an Argentine-based
Arab businessman who yearns to
return to his ancestral homeland.
Once in Syria, he does his job so
well that he rises to become deputy
defence secretary. The real story,
detailed in the book The Spy Who
Came from Israel by Uri Dan and
Yeshayahu Ben Porat , is far-fetched
enough, but no less out there than
the fact that Kim Philby and David
Shayler worked for her majesty’s
secret service.
This adaptation is not helped by
risible montages. Nor is the clunky
freighted dialogue of much benefi t.
The main problem, though, is Noah
Emmerich as Eli’s Mossad trainer
Dan Peleg. His presence highlights
The S py’s defi ciencies by reminding
us of a much better drama, The
Americans, in which Peleg played
CIA Agent Stan Beeman. The Spy,
by contrast, looks conventional, old
fashioned and plodding.
Stuart Jeff riesLast night’s TV
The Spy
Netfl ix
★★★☆☆Sacha Baron Cohen dusts off
his Borat moustache and goes
undercover as an Israeli secret
agent in this plodding dramaWhat we learned
RA seek naked ambition
The Royal Academy of Arts is calling
for volunteers to help recreate Marina
Abramović’s Imponderabilia –
a “living door” in which a naked
man and woman face each other in
a doorway while strangers squeeze
through the narrow space between
them. The piece will be part of an
autumn 2020 retrospective of the
Serbian performance artist’s work.Scarlett stands by Woody
Scarlett Johansson has defended
Woody Allen, saying she believes him
innocent of the abuse accusations
made by his adopted daughter Dylan
Farrow. Allen has directed the actress
in three fi lms: “I love [him]” she
told the Hollywood Reporter. “He
maintains his innocence, and I believe
him. I would work with him any time.”King Tut rules Paris
A vast display of treasures linked to
Egypt’s boy king Tutankhamun has
attracted more than 1.3m visitors
in Paris, becoming the most visited
exhibition in French history. The
show, which travels to London’s
Saatchi Gallery in November, features
the largest number of Tutankhamum
treasures ever to leave Egypt.himlan
ressieve
me.”▲ Alex Jennings and Lindsay Duncan
PHOTOGRAPH: CATHERINE ASHMOREhatutnar-ll
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