Our Private Life at the Royal Court

Pedro Miguel Rozo’s self-labelled family parable is set in a Columbian village on the cusp of becoming a town. Despite the opening of a shiny new shopping mall with its promise of material pleasures and a veneer of urban sophistication, the community still operates like a village; rumours can still spread like a spark through dry grass and the currents of gossip can still pull a man down.

Nothing is truly private in such a place and Rozo emphasises this by muddying the line between interior and exterior. The characters thoughts are often spoken out loud so that not only the audience but also the other characters, can hear them. It is not uncommon for one character to admonish another for not thinking more quietly.

Our Private Life is the first of two plays presented by the Royal Court along with readings and seminars and a second play, Aleksey Scherbak’s Remembrance Day, as part of what they’re terming an International Playwrights Season.

A rumour is doing the rounds that Carlos’s father molested his twelve year old farmhand and this makes Carlos, a “bi-polar compulsive fantasist”, worry that his father may have done the same thing to him when he was a boy. He turns first to Sergio, his older brother (or half-brother, as it turns out), whose marriage and success as a businessman have failed to endear him to their father, and then to his psychiatrist, whose willingness to help Carlos excavate his childhood memories owes much to his desire to own a nicer car.

Rozo’s play, presented in a translation by Simon Scardifield, has a sensational quality and the characters make constant reference to the way unfolding events resemble something out of a daytime soap or a movie. In this light, the performances are pitched at an appropriate level of artifice, encompassing extremes of emotion, with Colin Morgan’s pipe cleaner-limbed Carlos exploding into tears like a hysterical toddler before trying to do away with himself with a butter knife, or the whole family perkily embarking on a doomed Christmas dinner before this too breaks down around them.

Morgan came to prominence in the Young Vic’s adaption of Vernon God Little and indeed Lyndsey Turner’s production shares something of that novel’s Technicolor excess as well as certain parallels of plot; there are also definite echoes of the films of Almodovar in the play’s manner of exaggeration, its relationship with the absurd, and in scenes in which Ishia Bennison’s volatile matriarch flings her prosthetic breast across the kitchen table.

Morgan is springy and boyish, his eyes suggesting both damage and a degree of glee at the chaos wrought. Bennison, as his mother, hits on an intriguing balance as a woman trying to protect her husband from the waves of accusation and ultimately shielding only herself; she maintains a shell that only occasional breaks. Adrian Schiller has the requisite air of tainted professional dignity as the psychiatrist whose wardrobe and whiskey of choice improve in quality as paranoia becomes increasingly rampant in town and his services are more frequently called upon.

Shunt’s Lizzie Clachlan’s set consists of a versatile green sliding panel that resembles a Japanese shōji door in the way it suggests that nothing is ever fully concealed; seen in silhouette it also brings to mind the screen in a confessional.

The pay-off, when it comes – in the form of a downbeat coda- lacks the chill of revelation; the use of sexual abuse as metaphor seems an overplayed device and after the near-cartoonish tone of all that’s gone before, the ugliness that finally comes to light strikes an uneasy note – possibly not in the way intended.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Cops And Cons

There seems to be some miscommunication at the Young Vic. For their new production, a revival of Thomas Babe’s A Prayer For My Daughter, the stage has been vertically and horizontally divided. By this I mean the auditorium has been split down the middle to form a traverse stage, with the audience steeply aligned on either side, and the set itself has been made into a two level affair, with a flight of stairs leading down from above.

Only nobody seems to have noticed all this spare space. The second – top – level of the set is a dead zone, made up of only of wires holding up the ‘ceiling’ below. Sitting midway up the stalls this just about worked in terms of sightlines, but it seemed like a bizarre choice of layout, especially since the current seating arrangement has taken the downstairs entrance to the auditorium out of play, leading to some major bottle-necking as people filed out at the interval. (The woman standing next to me even exclaimed, with wonderfully elongated vowels: “This will never do, what if there were a fire!”)

And the play, oh yes, the play. Babe’s 1978 New York-set cop shop drama is an intense four-hander. We’re in Sidney Lumet territory here, think Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, sweat and the city, men’s souls spilling over. So we have two cops, Kelly and Jack, and two criminals, Sean and Jimmy, with clear parallels between them, the thin blue line blurred, you get the picture.

An old lady has been shot dead, half her head blown off. And the two cops are determined to extract a confession. This is the 1970s though, so a punch in the gut is still a valid interrogation technique and shooting up in the office with your junkie suspect barely raises an eyebrow.

The dead old lady quickly gets forgotten, the crime seems like an afterthought thrown in by the playwright to get these men together. Babe’s interests in the changing nature of masculinity in post-Vietnam America, in what makes a man a man, in what makes a good father, bleed off the stage, but the clunky structure of the play works against any real sense of revelation. Kelly, the older and wearier of the two police officers, has a screwed up daughter who keeps phoning up, distraught, threatening to shoot herself. But he seems only minimally perturbed by this disturbance. The audience also struggles to care.

Dominic Hill’s production takes a good while to find its feet, and some of the actors overdo the Nu Yoik shtick, but in the second act things hit their stride, leading to some powerful and moving moments. The best of these occurs between Corey Johnson’s Jack, the younger police officer, and the more grounded of the two, despite his own drug use, and Sean Chapman, as traumatised Vietnam medic Sean. His account of cradling a dying soldier, as he tries to explain his sexuality to Jack, is incredibly powerful. "There's a woman inside me, officer," he tells him, "and she aches for the men she has known."

Colin Morgan, who, last year, played Vernon in the Young Vic’s wonky version of Vernon God Little, here plays the quivering young junkie Jimmy. At one point he was forced to strip to the altogether, ushering some rather sweet gasps from the gaggle of teenage girls a couple of rows behind me. It’s a very physical, very big performance, all ripples and twitches, somewhat undermined, for me, by his insistance on speaking like Ren from Ren and Stimpy throughout. As you can imagine, once my brain had made this connection, it was rather difficult to take him seriously – even during his big monologue about watching his daughter come into the world.

I also noticed that the actors playing the cons were still hand-cuffed when they returned to the stage to take their bows. I hope someone remembered to undo them before the after party.