“Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?” asked a plaintive Tony Hancock in a 12 Angry Men parody. Judging by the four short plays assembled by director Gareth Machin which riff on the foundational document, it would seem the old girl is indeed looking a bit ragged after 800 years. If the evening has an overall message, it is that we need to act urgently to protect our vanishing freedoms.
The sharpest piece comes from Howard Brenton who, in a 30-minute play called Ransomed, combines a political point with the lurid excitement of the TV series, Spooks. Brenton’s big idea is that a Russian oligarch (a bullishly brazen Tim Frances) has stolen a copy of Magna Carta that he offers to return in exchange for British citizenship. This gives Brenton the chance to portray property-grabbing Russians as the new robber barons while also having a go at the flimflam of parliamentary democracy, the corrosive power of Secret Intelligence Services and the quiet corruption of English cathedral cities. Brenton has even created an abrasive, Latin-quoting female cop (Joanna van Kampen) who seems destined to have a longer life.
The other plays share Brenton’s assumption that Magna Carta, whatever its iconic aura, has done little to guarantee our freedoms. Anders Lustgarten’s Kingmakers, written in jaunty mock-Shakespearean verse and set in 1225 as Henry III finally achieves the throne, suggests that popular rebellion in Britain will always be defeated by our infantile subservience to monarchy: it’s not a view I share, but it is put across with vigour.
Timberlake Wertenbaker has also written a terse, cryptic, dystopian fable, We Sell Right, that imagines a Britain in which every last asset has been crassly sold off by successive governments. Wertenbaker does, however, offer a sliver of hope by showing two veteran female protesters (Frances Jeater and Vivienne Rochester) arguing that the key words in Magna Carta – “right” and “justice” – cannot be privatised.
What the evening proves is that a short play needs a strong, central idea.
Unfortunately, this is forgotten by Sally Woodcock in the sprawling Pink Gin. In a laudable attempt to remind us that Magna Carta also enshrined a free man’s right to live off the land, she shows a dictatorial African president (Trevor Michael Georges) surrendering to the forces of global capitalism: even three hours would not be long enough to address all the issues Woodcock raises. But this is the one misfire in a bold evening that had the citizens of this beautiful, sedate-seeming city, which houses its own copy of Magna Carta, endorsing the radical idea that the old text desperately needs a new update.
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At Salisbury Playhouse until 7 November. Box office: 01722 320333.
