Re-emergence means, we hope, reinvention. Sonia Friedman, the producing dynamo, is giving the theatre a shove in the direction of change by opening the Pinter after lockdown with a season of three plays under the title RE:EMERGE: all the dramas are new; all have the declared purpose of grappling with “urgent issues integral to rebuilding our society”; all are under the artistic guidance of the tremendous director Ian Rickson.
Amy Berryman’s debut play, Walden, the first in the series and set in the near future, is replete with talent. Gemma Arterton is fascinating as a failed astronaut who has retreated to the wild. Stiff with disappointment, her smile is stretched like a child posing for a photo when picked for the wrong team. Lydia Wilson is subtle as her twin sister, back from a triumphant space mission, feeling like a usurper, feeling dissatisfied. Between them is Fehinti Balogun, as an anti-technology rural activist: he has authority, perhaps enhanced by the actor’s off-stage engagement in climate-change discussions; he is working on a play on the subject with Complicité. Rae Smith’s design – a cabin cupped by a vigorous natural landscape – echoes her recent Uncle Vanya set: she and Rickson are becoming specialists in putting the country on stage.
Yet despite it all, this is a becalmed evening. Walden does, as promised, diligently tackle both post- and pre-pandemic concerns: the longing for escape into apparent simplicity and an idealised natural environment; the clamour for solutions from technological invention; the struggle, mainly women’s struggle, to maintain emotional ties, family life and professional adventure. It also sympathetically redistributes traditional male and female characteristics, offering us a chap who likes to talk and women who are good at fixing machines. Yet the oppositions are too absolute for any progression; the themes over-flagged up by the title (derived from Henry David Thoreau’s reflections on self-sufficiency in the deep countryside) and by significant names – the space-travelling sisters are called Stella and Cassiopeia; therapy-speak threatens when anyone is caring. Walden is like an old idea of a new play.
Unexpectedly, the most striking innovatory material can be seen in the apparently modest, over-familiar form of the monologue. Amy Trigg proves as writer and performer that a new voice can make a new subject. Crisply directed by Charlotte Bennett, Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me presents its audience with what will for most of them be new experiences and will shift the viewpoint on old ones. It also punches a hole in the conventional weave of emotion.
Trigg, a wheelchair user, has spina bifida. As does the character Juno (goddess of love, don’t forget) in whose voice she speaks. As she spins around the stage, in scarlet trouser suit, over-bright voice and comedy confrontation manner, she avoids predictable pathways: brave triumph over difficulty, sad slide from humour into tragedy. She begins, after many childhood operations, with the bleakest of statements: “I’d like one body alteration to be worth it.” Yet she ends by recognising something of herself in the hale, settled, career-driven best friend. Things can for anyone be at the same time terrible and terrific.
One after another come the arresting memories. When she has a go at online dating, one man informs her: “I’m going to fuck you so hard that you’ll walk.” A group of zealous Christians ask if they can pray for her – and so remind her that she is “broken”. Her on-off fellow never remembers that a latex allergy is more common in someone with spina bifida, so it is up to her to make sure they use the right condoms. When she develops a childhood fear of MRI scans, her parents try to help her by making her a cardboard model of a machine, covered in tinfoil. They stand outside it making loud noises: “basically, immersive theatre, really”.
Another swivelling of perspective is beautifully achieved in the eight monologues, each about 20 minutes long, each by a different hand, which make up Queers. Commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act, and first seen briefly five years ago at the Old Vic and on BBC Four, the playlets have been finely curated – queerated? – by Mark Gatiss. The historical range is impressive. As a first world war soldier – sombre and mild with a Kitchener moustache – Ben Whishaw delivers Gatiss’s own wistful description of khaki tenderness amid darkness and smoke. In Gareth McLean’s Something Borrowed, set nearly a century later, Alan Cumming prepares to give a speech about what it means to marry his lover. Cumming is twinkling, winking, smitten – bold but not entirely secure.
In Brian Fillis’s very sharp More Anger, Russell Tovey is effortlessly funny – and all the more instructive – as an actor running through the standard gay roles he is likely to land in 1987. Most often, he is the man who, when contracting Aids and getting a bit tetchy, retains his “sparky sense of humour to the end”. In Jon Bradfield’s Missing Alice, set in 1957, Rebecca Front, upholstered in a matching jacket and dress, is a woman who discovers that her husband is drawn to men. Well, says her mother-in-law, “better that than drink”. This is the outstanding piece: unexpected in its development; generous and flexible in its ideas of love and companionship; performed wryly and placidly by Front.
All of the episodes, with their faces directed by Gatiss in patient closeup, appear in the same traditional pub: chunky wooden bar, Victorian glass panels, murmurings around damp tables. Attitudes have changed, but slowly and insufficiently.
Star ratings (out of five)
Walden ★★★
Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me ★★★★
Queers ★★★★
• Walden is at the Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 12 June; Reasons You Should(n’t) Love Me is at the Kiln theatre, London, until 12 June; Queers is available on BBC iPlayer now and YouTube from 30 June
