New, of course, is a relative term and perhaps, as might be expected from a company that specialises in the work of a playwright who has been dead for 400 years, the definition in the RSC's New Work festival is pretty narrow. It seems to mean new plays, and rather old-fashioned ones at that. After a day in the theatre you begin to feel talked to death, as if you've been to a symposium about the terrible state we're in, rather than the theatre.
At Cox's Yard, Postcards from America offer two snapshots of contemporary US life in the age of terror. In the first and best, David Adjmi's 20-minute monologue Elective Affinities has well-heeled Alice, consummately played by Suzanne Burden, taking afternoon tea. With every blithe word, the thin mask of civilisation - applied as carefully as her makeup -begins to slip, until all that is left is the monster within. As chilling as sticking your head in the ice-box.
Less successful is Brett Neveu's Eric LaRue, set in the wake of a Columbine-style high school shooting. Janice's attempts to survive after her son has killed three classmates is hindered by the local pastor, who wants to bring her face to face with the mothers whose sons were killed, and her husband who has taken solace in Jesus. Lia Williams makes the hour a compelling study in grief and anger, and Barnaby Kay as the pastor offers a study of ineptitude and ego. But the piece lacks the steely courage of Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, which much more successfully excavates family life and American culture.
There is more peerless acting in Breakfast with Mugabe, Fraser Grace's slickly seductive attempt to get inside the head of President Mugabe. David Rintoul is Peric, a white man who calls himself an African and whose family has farmed in Zimbabwe for generations. He is also a famed psychiatrist at Harare hospital. When the President starts being visited by spirits, Peric is called in to help but discovers that just as the balance of power between white and black has shifted so has the traditional relationship between patient and practitioner. There are elegant echoes of Macbeth and Banquo in Grace's play, but the psychological thriller format is contrived, improbably calling for Peric to act more like Sherlock Holmes than a psychiatrist.
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