Review Last Of The Boys

Last of The Boys

by Steven Dietz

Publish and Be Damned

http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/

When does protecting one's interests turn into a massacre? When does commemoration turn into a commercial opportunity and even fetishism? When does accountability turn into expedient contrition with no penalty?

Weighty topics which, we felt, are all touched on in the European premiere of Steven Dietz's atmospheric 2004 play Last Of The Boys about two Vietnam War veterans, written a year after the start of the Iraq War.

At the same time, rest assured there is a leavening of wit and laughs along with the ingredients for a slippery drama given a careful production by director John Haidar.

In an abandoned Californian trailer park lives Ben (Demetri Goritsas), a Vietnam veteran, and the last man standing after all the other residents have sold out to a company also responsible for polluting the land.

Ben  is haunted not so much by the ghosts of his Vietnam comrades, but split by his late father's own link with the Secretary of State of Defense, former Ford executive Robert McNamara who knowingly presided over the sending out of hundreds of thousands of young men whose lives were cut short in Vietnam. Many years after the war, he put his recriminations into print. 

Academic Jeeter (Todd Boyce), inextricably linked to Ben, has built a career teaching "The 60's" with a book deal in the offing. He makes his annual summer pilgrimage to see his former comrade in arms. But this time he's come straight from Ben's father's funeral and is now accompanied by  35-year-old Salyer (Zoë  Tapper) whose arrival is quickly followed by the entrance of her feisty mother, Lorraine (Wendy Nottingham).

Jeeter himself has followed The Rolling Stones around on tour and, while  a fan, his main concern is to hold up a painted sign with a surprising piece of resonant advice on it providing a rueful laugh out loud moment.

The play, stretches right back to political and national icon Abraham Lincoln, setting in perspective  the mythologising of govermental misjudgements into a containable catharsis for a traumatized generation..

While the men jostle, bond and josh, the women are more functional and rather - well - male. It is to impress the younger generation in the shape of  goth-like Salyer that Ben commits the ultimate bond-breaking plagiarism while her mother swigs scotch and survives.   

Nevertheless, for most of the play, we were engrossed in the give and take between all the characters, including a ghostly soldier (Cavan Clarke) supporting and briefing Ben, transformed into McNamaara justifying military tactics..  

Yet TLT and her buddy are wavering whether the final portion of the play is a clunky jarring avalanche of liberal affront at Vietnam or a more ironic comment on mantras repeated on both sides like a needle stuck in a record groove.

We are inclined to think the latter but this isn't clear in an otherwise finely-acted and directed play. Maybe those last scenes would work better in a movie (Keanu Reeves for Ben came to mind!). Still, for an intricate production, with an evocative set by Max Dorey and lighting by Christopher Nairne,  an amber/green light from TLT and her own hippy camper van. 

Review After Independence

After Independence

by May (Mwewe) Sumbwanyambe

The Lie Of The Land

http://www.arcolatheatre.com

The country, a former colony, at first is unnamed. A farmer's family, husband Guy (Peter Guinness), wife Kathleen (Sandra Duncan) and daughter Chipo  (Beatriz Romilly)  all born in Africa, alone on their farm in the bush. 

Any night time rustle may signal imminent danger, not from nature but from maurauding gangs of former soldiers. And the name of the farm? Independence.

Part family saga, part fable, we learn eventually this is modern Zimbabwe with a civil servant (Stefan Adegbole)  making the trek to the farm with an offer to buy. An offer, so far, refused.

We never learn the ins and outs of funding and earning from the farm in a post colonial state. But this gives the play an archetypal feel and greater reach, stretching beyond Zimbabwe with implications of post colonialism for economies, property and families further afield..

This is the debut produced full-length play from May Sumbwanyambe. It sometimes feels  like an apprentice work, as put together as a film script rather than theatre. but it has a pleasing clarity and intellectual rigor which keeps the attention.

At the same time, there is a tendency to over-explain and some clunky symbolism loaded mostly upon the mother Kathleen.

Yet focussing as much on young Africans, black and white, as the legacy left by older generations, it is directed with clever stylistic precision by George Turvey. 

The lingering poses of the actors  convey the vast vistas,  entrenched self-dramatizing positions, alongside centuries of resentments . The enclosed wooden crate design by Max Dorey lit by Christopher Nairne also allows a feel of the ample raw resources, punishing labour and the open spaces beyond the wooden slats.

So it's a curious mixture of the over emphatic and the skilfully placed justaposition. The struggle for rights may be, as forcefully put, about the struggle for land. 

But there is also a recognition there are some legacies of colonialism that are not just a matter of simple ownership reversal. A hint of the new tribe, having emerged  from  European exploitation,   in the  double edged comment of the daughter Chipo to bureacrat Charles:

"My family line may not go back in this country as far as yours, but we are all seedlings from the same tree, Charles. Only some are dark and some are light."

The myths of two separate peoples, in reality yoked together, clash in this intriguing if flawed work. Meanwhile the current predatory global  search for property, whether for individual or collective enrichment, make the disquiet over  government, employment, business, contracts and disenfranchisement hit close to home. An amber/green light.