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The Phlebotomist – Hampstead Theatre Every one of us has met a phlebotomist but until I was on my way to Hampstead for Ella Road’s absorbing first play I didn’t know what the word meant. Turns out it’s the technician who draws your blood when you need a blood test. I’ve had dozens, we all have, it’s the fastest and easiest method of discovering what’s actually going on in your body from diabetes to high cholesterol. They take your blood, test it in a number of ways and you often don’t need any more than that for diagnosis. At the very least, the results of the blood test will tell the doctor what other investigation needs to be done. Marvellously useful simple science. But what if a simple blood test could tell the doctor what illnesses you will contract in your life? What if every one of us had a blood profile, like a DNA genome, which laid out what incurable diseases you were going to get, from breast cancer to Huntingdon’s to Motor Neurone to, well anything, and provided a permanent unchangeable blueprint for the rest of your life? A rating, let’s say, where a low number would mean that you would never be able to get a job, to get married, to get into a university? All the education, jobs and rewards would go to the highly rated individuals, the low-rated would be relegated to a bare existence. Ella Road imagines that this has already happened and, although Bea, her phlebotomist, has a fairly mundane job, it is her responsibility to take the blood and ensure that every sample is properly marked and passed on to the doctors for analysis. And then her best friend comes to be tested and begs her to exchange her blood for that of a person without genetic disease in her family so she can get a better job. It is now clear that there are people who will cheat the system, others who will pay for a higher rated blood sample, And corruption sets in, the ratings are no longer inviolate. Just a few weeks ago we started hearing about parents in America who will pay any amount to get a better college placement for their offspring, lie, cheat, falsify exam records, and forge documents, and in this country there are agencies and individuals who, for large sums of money, will rent you a home in another school district which you don’t need to live in so your children can get into the better local schools. What then happens to the children of parents who can’t afford to buy them the best? If intelligent, educated people are willing so to compromise their principles as to commit crimes for a better school for their children, imagine what they might do if every aspect of their lives were at stake. It’s not science fiction because the technology already exists. All it needs is a Government ruling that we must all have a blood rating as well as a DNA genome and Ella Road’s dystopian vision becomes reality. As a play, The Phlebotomist holds interest throughout, even when Bea falls in love, marries, and then discovers she’s made a fatal mistake. The cast is very young, several of them are making their debut here, and while that’s admirable, the play could use some more weight in the acting. The issues all land but the characters don’t. Emilia – Vaudeville Theatre Emilia Bassano was a real woman who lived in Shakespeare’s time. Born 1569, died 1645. Daughter of a musician at the court of Queens Elizabeth 1, she definitely was the mistress of Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon, some 40 years her senior. After she became pregnant, he married her off and she published one of the first ever books of poetry by a woman. She started a school for poor women in St Giles, the most dangerous area of London. Those are the facts. But was she the Dark Lady of the Sonnets? Nobody knows, although Emilia, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s all female play, recently transferred to the West End from the Globe, is anxious that we should believe it. The play also asserts, with no evidence that I can discern, that she was Shakespeare’s mistress and indeed wrote some of his plays. Played well at three stages of her life by three actors with very different styles, Emilia spends the evening being furious. She had cause. If you were going to be an Elizabethan woman, you’d better be a queen or you would spend your life being ignored, insulted, and passed over. If you had independent tendencies, for example, you wanted to write plays or books or poetry, you had a very difficult row to hoe indeed. Marriage was a form of slavery but it was better than being single. Better still to be mistress to someone important as Emilia was. At least the dresses were better quality and there was often some good jewellery to be had along with a limited degree of freedom not available to wives. All in all, Emilia didn’t have such a bad life for the time. But she was furious. And the final scene of the play is a monologue delivered by Emilia 3, Clare Perkins, who was so brilliant and nuanced in Sweat and is here directed to deliver her speech in an unvarying scream. She lays into her times, the men in her life, and the unfairness of the circumstances of women. It felt like, but wasn’t, an hourlong rant, delivered at full volume. What frightened me about it wasn’t the content, which is the richly trodden ground of righteous feminist anger – we’ve not only heard it all before, many of us have said it all before - but its effect. It turned the largely female audience into a baying mob, standing and screaming back, applauding and yelling, and I think I was the only female member of the audience not on my feet, not joining the shrieking, the only one truly appalled by the ability of a crowd to become a mob. Spend an evening at Emilia and the last 15 minutes will show you how the Trump rallies can happen. Admissions – Trafalgar Studios Admissions was surely written before the current scandal about parents going to any lengths to get their children into Ivy Leagues universities but that, in sum, is the plot of Joshua Harmon’s play in which two deserving boys, one white, one black, apply to Yale. One gets in, one doesn’t. Guess which one? No, the other one. That’s not what it’s about, that’s just the plot. What it’s about is race, about identity, about what it means to be white, and what it’s like to be black, and how our changing mores assign value to racial identity? Alex Kingston plays the admissions officer for a good prep school in New England. The status of her school (of which her husband is Principal), and her job, depends on how many students are accepted to Ivy League colleges each year but, also, how racially diverse it can be shown to be and she works hard to admit as many black and mixed race students as possible. Her son, Charley, is a fine boy, ticks all the boxes, smart, good looking, excellent exam scores, well read, a credit to his proud parents who are, as you would expect in an American play for our times, liberal, charming, educated and thoughtful. And, did I say liberal? But wait. So is Danny, his best friend. And his best friend’s father is black, so there’s one more box to tick and Danny ticks it where Charlie doesn’t. Alex Kingston lives up to her billing as the star actor, using her flexible body and voice to reflect the conflict of a mother who wants only the best for her child, and a professional whose liberal views must applaud the admission of a black student over a white one in a milieu which is almost entirely white even when the one who loses out is her own child. But the star performance comes from a young American actor, Ben Edelman, as Charley. His agony, as he rails against the unfairness of being passed over for his friend may be unworthy and selfish, but it’s entirely understandable. He’s only 17, after all. But Edelman’s Charley delivers a blistering 10-minute diatribe containing every racist trope, every awful thought you’ve ever had about affirmative action, every argument against deciding anything on grounds of race, never mind the course of a young person’s life. Edelman is simply electrifying, his body convulsing into fury and his voice, so recently released from that of a child, articulating hateful thoughts to his horrified parents, who, understanding where all this is coming from, are helpless to ameliorate them.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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