More than Consent. Heartfelt approval. It is hard to overemphasise the multilayered subtlety of Nina Raine’s new play. The trigger is a rape case. Two barrister friends are pitted against each other, representing a woman who was drunk and distressed and a man who has an undisclosed history of violence. Their accounts are irreconcilable. In the adversarial system you do not put yourself into the mind of the other. Raine does not spring from this into a courtroom drama – though there is a compelling scene between barrister and bewildered client. The real subject of her play is empathy. Is it possible?
An infant refers to himself as “you”: after all, that’s what everyone else calls him. Barristers speak of their cases as if they were inhabiting them: “I’m a rapist…” The sympathy is merely semantic. A caustic wife observes her husband welcoming a new client: “another accent for me to do”. As marriages come unstitched, people used to performing to each other lose their sense of who they are.
In this co-production with Out of Joint, Roger Michell directs with his particular combination of precision and leisureliness. Nothing is rapped out; everything is sharp; naturalism is fluorescent. A married couple lovingly and crossly fail to fold sheets together. Conversations murmur on as characters move off, as if the lines we hear are merely drops in a sea of speech. The audience is stacked on both sides of the action. Adversarially. Hildegard Bechtler’s design shines under a thicket of different lampshades. Light may fall on the same material in more than one way. Consent is comedy as well as near-tragedy.
Raine’s wit is versatile. Both intimate – food is described as smelling “of cupboard” – and satirical. An actress is asked to play a female barrister: “speaks Mandarin, Rollerblades”. Daisy Haggard – dippy, scathing, sad – is impressive as that actress. Ben Chaplin is sleek, unreadable, slippery, precarious as a shite barrister husband. Anna Maxwell Martin is a marvel. Childlike but not childish, she gives out most when seeming most to be going into herself. Who else could so painfully suggest the throb of toothache – or so lightly transmit the moment when talking of love becomes an act of seduction?
There is so much going on here – everything from Greek Furies to eco-friendly crackers – it’s sometimes hard to breathe. Occasionally the machinery – with its echoes and reversals – is too beautifully burnished. Who cares? Consent has a long future. It pulls off one of the most important things a play can do: it helps us to listen in a new way. Almost to empathise.
