Alexi Kaye Campbell’s fascinating new play has strong echoes of Ian McEwan’s 1981 novel The Comfort of Strangers. Once again we see an English couple being manipulated by a married duo they meet on holiday but, where McEwan’s story is imbued with sexual corruption, Campbell’s play is more about America’s propensity to impose its will on individuals and whole societies.
The action is set on the Greek island of Skiathos. In 1967, on the eve of the country’s military coup, we see playwright Theo and his actor wife Charlotte rashly inviting to dinner the domineering Harvey and the alcoholic June. Harvey, who works for the US government, not only tries to dictate what Theo should write but persuades the English couple to buy, at a cutdown price, the peasant cottage they are renting.
When the quartet are reunited in 1976, we see the consequences of their actions and realise that Harvey has been psychologically damaged by his involvement in the overthrow of Chile’s President Allende.
Even if Theo’s naivety is hard to credit and Harvey’s sexual ambivalence remains unexplored, the play raises a host of issues. Campbell, who is half Greek, is clearly writing about his country’s historical openness to exploitation, and more especially about US appropriation of the concept of democracy. To his credit he avoids making CIA man Harvey a simple villain, and suggests he is destroyed by his nation’s ruinous interventionism.
These subtleties emerge in Simon Godwin’s fine production, in which Hildegard Bechtler’s paradisal set becomes an arena for power-plays and in which the acting is consistently good. Ben Miles as Harvey exudes a colonising authority and even eyes Theo’s uncompleted play with predatory zeal. Pippa Nixon lends Charlotte the right note of resistance to Harvey’s determined intrusiveness. Sam Crane as the pliable Theo and Elizabeth McGovern as the retsina-sloshing June lend substance to their more thinly conceived characters. But the play works because it keeps you constantly hooked and because, in its affirmation of Greece’s capacity to endure cultural and economic invasion, it is nakedly political.
- At the Dorfman, London, until 4 August. Box office: 020-7452 3000.
