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The Haystack – Hampstead Theatre It bothers us all, that nagging question of whether ‘they’ know too much about us. The ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear’ concept doesn’t always cover it. Everybody has secrets, things you’d rather other people didn’t know about you. But if you’ve got a mobile phone, and who hasn’t these days, the fact is that ‘they’ know everything. Or can find out with a few keystrokes. The doctor’s receptionist who makes you fill out a form with your name, address, date of birth, etc, already has all that information on the screen right in front of her. She’s just covering the doctor for malpractice insurance. The phone number you didn’t want to give the creepy man who’s been talking to you on the bus can be discovered before you reach your stop. Your bank details, your address, your passport number, your daily routine, your gym workout, and your shoe size are in everybody else’s pocket. One uncomfortable fact is that an average person on an average day may be caught on as many as 300 cameras just going to and from work. We accept it because we have to. It is possible, just about, to cut yourself off from our urban world, not to have a cell phone, not to give any personal details to anyone and to erase yourself from public databases but imagine what a faff daily life would become. My literary agent has refused to get a computer, has no credit cards, no mobile, no car, and does all his communicating via beautiful copperplate handwriting on a postcard. Much as I love him, this isn’t a charming eccentricity, it’s a pain in the neck when you need to get in touch. Our world has changed, his hasn’t. Which is what makes The Haystack so immediate and so arresting. A Saudi princess, angry with her husband, has been feeding secrets to a Guardian journalist. GCHQ needs to find the leak and puts two of its computer geeks onto it. Outside of their uncanny ability with data retrieval and genius IQs, they are both ordinary kids. Zef is black (Enyi Okoronkwo) and therefore more concerned about facial recognition and other forms of surveillance which disproportionately target people of colour but otherwise a happy enough kid who is into girls and football and beer and, well, girls. Neil (Oliver Johnstone) is clumsy and nerdy and communicates only through computer keyboards and doesn’t know he’s charming. They find the leak in seconds but soon the princess dies in mysterious circumstances which unhinges the young journalist, Cora, (Rona Morison in a nicely controlled performance) who has befriended her. The two young geeks are promoted to surveillance duties and one, socially awkward Neil, falls in love with Cora who he has been stalking via her computer and phone. This is, of course, the stuff of many spy thrillers, the watcher falling for the watched, and it’s handled pretty well by Hampstead’s new Artistic Director, Roxana Silber, and first-time playwright, Al Blyth. For me, the most interesting question raised was the issue of who is an enemy of the state and therefore whose data should be collected and examined. Proven terrorists, sure, but what about campaigning journalists or political dissidents? What about Suffragettes or the women at Porton Down? Vegetarians or animal rights activists? At various times all these have been considered enemies of the state and we’ve never decided in this country who the state actually is. The government of the day? Us? The Visit – Olivier Theatre, National Friedrich Durrenmatt’s 1956 The Visit is a Swiss-German fable about revenge and greed. Even in Tony Kushner’s supple new adaptation it is still a Swiss-German fable about revenge and greed, now set in a small town in Upstate New York. An old lady, now the richest woman in the world, returns to her hometown, now a bankrupt and hopeless dump. She offers to give the townspeople one billion dollars if they will kill the man who jilted her as a teenager and left her pregnant and alone. This fairly simple story takes nearly four hours to tell and the ending is never in doubt. There’s some fine acting here, especially from Lesley Manville who is never less than excellent as the frightful old woman who never forgives and never forgets, and from Hugo Weaving as her nemesis, the man who goes from being the most popular man in town to town pariah, but the play itself is irredeemably dark, heavy and Teutonic in the worst sense. Jeremy Herrin’s production and Vicki Mortimer’s set do all they can to distract us from Durrenmatt’s endless insistence on hitting his moral certainties over and over again. Yes, we get it. Money corrupts. Morality is bendable. Women’s vengeance can be terrible. Democracy does not benefit the minority. Punishment can be out of proportion to the crime. Bearing false witness can result in castration and blindness (what?). These truths, to misquote the Declaration of Independence, we hold to be self-evident. Durrenmatt wrote that The Visit was a comedy but you can’t tell it by me. There is not a single laugh that wasn’t put there by the director and the actors and not many of those. Vicki Mortimer’s stunning set that conjures a forest of trees from a solid floor, and the famous Olivier revolve which is used (and overused) to such effect, are themselves characters in the play. Judge for yourselves whether they should be. Endgame – The Old Vic I hate to admit this but I have never understood Endgame and, having now seen it done by Alan Cumming and Daniel Radcliffe, directed by Richard Jones, about as well as I can imagine its being done by anyone, I still don’t understand it. These two are marvellous, as are Jane Horrocks and Karl Johnson, who are the rest of the cast, but why you should want to spend an evening in the company of these four horrible characters is never explained. Even their names are unattractive. I mean, do you want to meet Clov, Hamm, Nagg and Nell? And what does it mean? Circles, beginnings and endings, repetition, death. That’s as far as I can take you on this journey. It’s all Beckett to me.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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