Infamy, power and privilege are the themes of Katherine Moar’s short, snappy and hugely enjoyable second play. It’s inspired by Patty Hearst, the media heiress kidnapped by purported US guerilla group the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 and later convicted of robbing banks with them, though she was coerced and raped. Moar’s debut, Farm Hall, was about the Allies eavesdropping on captured German atomic scientists in a country house, and it transferred from Jermyn St to the Haymarket. Diffuse ideas spark interestingly in this writer’s mind.
We observe the rich girl and her lawyer during her trial but first meet them 40 years later, when she’s been exonerated and he is seeking her testimonial against unnamed allegations, presumably related to MeToo. Perhaps for legal reasons they’ve been renamed, though they share quite a bit of backstory with Hearst and her real-life attorney F. Lee Bailey, who also defended OJ Simpson and the Boston Strangler. The play’s title is a red herring as neat and oblique as the word “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s critique of Patty’s plutocrat grandfather, WR Hearst.
It starts with Nathaniel Parker’s “Robert” and Abigail Cruttenden’s “Holly” trading spiky, sarky barbs, almost in the manner of a screwball comedy. They’re separated by his vast leather sofa, which cost $50,000 in the 70s and is too fine to be sat upon. Initially a symbol of Robert’s success, it’s become the visible manifestation of his absurdity and decline. He’s still working, still tending the legacy that scandal might overshadow. A heart attack on 9/11 put paid to his midnight martinis but he still smokes because “you have time to run away from cancer”. His wife is conspicuously absent.
This is a lovely role for Parker, with something of the jocular arrogance of his Henry VIII in Wolf Hall. Cruttenden has a harder task as Holly is solely defined by her past – or in Robert’s phrasing, her “victim-ness” – until the end. She tackles the role with a stripped-back, grim-faced rigour.
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Their younger iterations, identified as “The Heiress” and “The Lawyer”, are played by a skittish Katie Matsell and a preening Ben Lamb. Even in a prison smock she’s heedless in her bubble, starting an account of her kidnap with a peevish fear that her new sports car has been scratched, and telling him about a fashionable drink in Europe, the cappuccino. She’s facile, until she flatly relates her sexual assault by the would-be revolutionary she later wrote passionate letters to.
The swaggering young attorney’s air of entitlement turns out to be fresher-grown and more fragile: he’s shamelessly using this case to get ahead. The gender politics of the 70s are in play here, and the slow murder of 1960s idealism by domestic violence, the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon. Moar laces in astute references to the Manson family killings and other morbid parts of the American dream. “You burnished my brand,” Parker’s Robert tells Cruttenden’s Holly, “like when a Kennedy dies freakishly”.
Director Josh Seymour orchestrates it briskly, with drum-driven rock music between scenes, and a light touch when the younger characters start to interact with their older selves. “I am the choices you made,” harrumphs Parker to the disappointed and disgusted Lamb. Apart from the vast sofa – which eventually fulfils its symbolic purpose – Ceci Calf’s set features a glazed LA feature wall, boxes containing Robert’s past, and artfully deployed lights.
A mercifully brief 75-minute running time means Moar’s play touches lightly on questions rather than furnishing decisive answers. I’d have liked more of her imaginative insight into these characters and themes, and the increasingly foreign country that is the 70s. But what she’s given us proves that she’s a talent to watch.
Jermyn Street Theatre, to Nov 15; jermynstreettheatre.co.uk
