The Spectator - October 29, 2016

BOOKS & ARTS

Theatre

Sweet and sour

Lloyd Evans

A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on

Cancer

Dorfman, until 29 November

The Red Barn

Lyttelton, until 17 January 2017

Shopping and Fucking

Lyric Hammersmith, until 5 November

Great subject, terminal illness. Popular dra-

mas like Love Story, Terms of Endearment

and My Night With Reg handle the issue with

tact and artistry by presenting us with a sin-

gle victim and a narrative focus that reveals

as much about the survivors as about the

patient. Crucially, the disease is omitted from

the title for fear of discouraging the punters

from mentioning the work in conversation.

A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer

violates all these strictures. Half a dozen

characters seated in a hospital ward shout at

us about their failing health. These disjoint-

ed gobbets of testimony are interspersed

with repetitive zombie dances and noisy

songs with lyrics like ‘fuck cancer’. Snatches

of insulting dialogue reinforce the mood of

chippy sourness. A mother with an afflicted

baby tells a lung-cancer victim he should be

ashamed of himself for smoking. He wittily

orders her to ‘fuck off’ and adds, with a snort

of toxic fumes, that he pays his taxes.

This boring, preachy philistine drama

goes around in circles for two hours and then

reveals itself as a hoax. The author Bryony

Kimmings, in a recorded announcement,

informs us that the characters are based on

real victims (although it’s unclear who cre-

ated the snippy dialogue and the grisly char-

acterisations). The Kimmings voice then asks

a cancerous patient to climb up on stage and

deliver a few words of confession. Finally,

she invites us to yell out the names of vic-

tims among our acquaintance. The house

erupted with fretful imprecations. ‘Granny!’

‘Keith!’ ‘Araminta!’ ‘Bill!’ ‘Tiberius!’ ‘Bian-

ca!’ Anthropologists would have found this

crude ceremony fascinating: ‘The savages are

obsessed with a mysterious wasting disease

their medicine cannot cure. The adults gather

in a communal hut and watch their chanting

brethren imitate the witch doctor’s rites of

healing. The sacrament ends when the sav-

ages invoke the names of the recently dead

in the hope that spirits dwelling in the under-

world may protect them from infection.’ I’d

rate this as one of the ugliest nights of my life.

The Red Barn is David Hare’s new adap-

tation of a Georges Simenon thriller set

among American millionaires. I hate thrill-

ers. Their goal is to trick the audience with

the manipulative concealment of basic

information, and they oblige the play-goer

to surrender his intellectual autonomy to an

absent puppetmaster. This thriller — which

is as bad as they get — is executed brilliantly.

Ray is lost in a snowstorm. His best friend

Donald volunteers to look for him but gets

scared and hides in a barn

smoking cigarettes. Later

Donald’s wife finds the butts

and reveals his duplicity. But

did Donald want Ray dead?

Will Donald slay his wife

to save himself? How will

Ray’s widow, now dallying

with Donald, respond to the

truth?

The plot is laid out with

slow-moving subtlety. The

visuals are superb. There

are multiple sets, sometimes

partially obscured by sliding

panels, which offer a supple-

mentary mystery because

they seem to occupy more

space than the stage encom-

passes. Hare’s dialogue is

taut, razor-sharp and fantas-

tically unpleasant. This per-

fectly suits the loathsome,

narcissistic characters. Eve-

ryone on stage is a calcu-

lating monster plotting to

increase his or her personal

store of status, wealth and

erotic fulfilment.

The outstanding feature is the atmos-

phere. Dread and anxiety haunt every

beat of the play and I spent much of it

with my eyes closed for fear that some-

body’s stabbed corpse might pop out of an

innocuous wardrobe. Robert Icke’s styl-

ish direction is marred by an over-noisy

soundtrack. The snowstorm isn’t merely as

loud as a real snowstorm. It’s louder. And

each scene is punctuated with a pointless

FLASH! BANG! of fireworks. After the

second explosion I crammed my digits into

my ears while the sets were being shifted

around. Whodunit fans should heed my sin-

cere praise for this show even though I spent

much of it with my eyes clenched tight and

both my ears plugged with gummy fingers.

Shopping and Fucking is another prob-

lem title. Labelling your play with a taboo

word makes the punters less likely to discuss

the show, to invite a friend along, or even to

book a ticket over the phone. Twenty years

ago Mark Ravenhill titillated the country

with his outrageous yarn about bisexual

drug addicts swapping partners and, in a cli-

mactic scene, buggering a suicidal teenager

with a screwdriver.

Everything seems rather dated now.

Including the dating. The buttock-pumpers

meet in a supermarket rather than online.

And the moral centre ground has shifted

enormously. Gay orgies were rather wicked

in the 1990s but they can no longer shock

a society where schoolkids watch execution

videos on smartphones. The cast treat the

show as a celebration. Audience members,

including me, were invited on stage to drink

and dance. I hate to disappoint anyone but it

all felt sweet and rather suburban.

MANUEL HARLAN

Dread and anxiety haunt every beat of the play: Elizabeth Debicki as Mona Sanders in David Hare’s

‘The Red Barn’

I’d rate this as one of the ugliest

night s of my life