Called to Account
Tricycle, London NW6
Rafta, Rafta...
Lyttelton, London SE1
The Kiss of the Spider Woman
Donmar, London WC2
It is an experience like no other in the theatre. The tribunal plays of the Tricycle - which use only words that have actually been spoken - have tapped audiences directly into political events and judicial proceedings. In doing so, they have changed the idea of what performance is: these plays are delivered with a hyper-realistic meticulousness that makes most actors look as if they were living in the age of Henry Irving.
So far, so truthful. The Tricycle has reconstructed the Nuremberg Trials, the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, the Hutton Inquiry. But its latest production is different. Called to Account is not reconstruction but construction: it sets up its own trial - with lawyers from Cherie Blair's Matrix Chambers - to test the proposition that Tony Blair should be indicted for the crime of aggression against Iraq. The play, edited by Richard Norton-Taylor from interviews with politicians, UN officials, journalists, is absorbing. Nicolas Kent's sober production is distinguished: so detailed that the audience watch faces or indeed feet - one lawyer has shucked her shoes; another perches on flighty high heels - as if seeing them in close-up. Nevertheless, this lacks the extra dimension of the best of these dramas: you aren't watching a piece of actual history. And it's open to the charge of tendentiousness. The prosecution witnesses are far stronger than those for the defence.
This isn't to agree with David Aaronovitch, who, stoutly defending the pro-war case in a post-show discussion, declared that the show was pointless because it had unearthed no new material. It would have been about as surprising as finding a WMD in Iraq if the evening had unearthed explosive new data, and spectators other than Aaronovitch-type experts are likely to find the crisp precis of events useful. An important reason for staging such debates is that they graphically demonstrate how an argument is changed by human incarnation. For opponents of the war, Richard Perle is in print about as persuasive as Jeffrey Archer ever is: but Shane Rimmer embodies him so brilliantly - like a grizzled Hollywood veteran delivering carefully considered statements - that even his statements about the civilised world begin to sound like modest summations. When Diane Fletcher's blazingly accurate Clare Short tells you in her scattergun way that Blair's interventions were 'little chats', she adds a detail to the dismal picture of the way we are governed. Few playwrights would allow their creatures the pungency and ironising that's heard here. And few would have allowed themselves to leave the conclusion open. On press night, Menzies Campbell pronounced that, despite his strong attachment to the prosecution's case, the verdict should be 'not proven'. Which is not to say that the war was just.
Ayub Khan-Din's first play, East is East, was produced a year before Blair came to power. Now he's delivered another hit, with quietly political aspects. Rafta, Rafta... is a reworking of Bill Naughton's 1961 play All in Good Time, which reinvents the central characters as two Indian families. This isn't the first time that a play about Northern working-class life has been Asianised - four years ago Tanika Gupta set Hobson's Choice in a sari emporium - and it's unlikely to be the last. It's a solid formula, and it's probably the only updating that could work for these class-based plays, which focus on generations that remain closely bound together despite the apparent social chasm between them. A young man is given a BlackBerry by his bride; his father muses: 'I was given a water buffalo.'
Inheritance, change and sex are the motors of the plot, which features a young couple who can't have congress because they're sharing a house with their in-laws: at the crucial moment, Dad always seems to be padding past their bedroom on his way to the lav. Some of the jollity (beds collapsing during a bonk) feels ancient; most of the sadness (the parents revisit their own estrangements through their children's misery) looks up-to-date. Meera Syal is beautifully contained, with a cardy over her sari and a determined smile over her anxiety, as the mother with a secret. As her bullying, easily crumpled husband, Harish Patel is both blustering and Bollywood dainty. Tim Hatley's design lets a Corrie-style photo of brick terraces fade into a jewel-coloured, double-storeyed interior. It's a good project for the National, this reconfiguring of a sturdy play. This one rings not exactly true all the way through, but like a superior sitcom version of the truth. And there's always room on the South Bank for Lafta, Lafta...
The Kiss of the Spider Woman - the story of a relationship between a Marxist revolutionary and a queeny window- dresser who share a cell, a movie fantasy and bodily fluids in a Buenos Aires jail - was written by Manuel Puig in defiance of the repressive political and sexual climate in 1970s Argentina. Now it looks merely like an acting opportunity. Charlotte Westenra's production pushes the buttons of torrid claustrophobia - yellow light filtered through a screen, silhouettes of uniformed figures at the cell door, distant guitar chords - without evoking real threat. Will Keen gives a bravura performance: he's petulant and sinuous (gesturing as if continually caressing an invisible body), yet also stoical and compassionate. But it's hard to think that a political thought has ever entered the head of Rupert Evans, whose revolutionary fervour carries about as much conviction as a boy scout's. This is one of the outworn faces of political theatre: full of musty metaphor and unearned intensity.
