Harley Granville Barker’s Waste was banned in 1907 for its scandalous content. Henry Trebell, an independent politician, bringing in a bill to disestablish the church, makes his lover, Amy O’Connell, a married woman, pregnant. When she dies as the result of an abortion, his career is imperilled. One of the challenges of making this play a success is that Trebell (crisply played by Charles Edwards) is so overbearing, one doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. Olivia Williams’s Amy is more sympathetic, a combination of cowed and defiant. The play reveals (not an unfamiliar idea) that politics is a separate language, with no bearing on a man’s private life. It is at its most invigorating on the subject of how and whether women are heard. Sylvestra Le Touzel is especially impressive as Trebell’s sister: forthright yet obstructed.
Roger Michell directs his accomplished cast judiciously, and the play is full of brilliant lines such as: “Why have you been talking to me as if I was someone else?”, yet it seems, for all its polished analysis of hypocrisy, imperfectly integrated. The smoothest thing about the evening is Hildegard Bechtler’s sleek set with black screens that slide across the stage like darkness moving over the face of the earth.
Theatre is a living art and never immune to life on the other side of the lights. On the press night, a member of the audience collapsed minutes before the end of the show. The play stopped. The house lights came on. An ambulance was called. When the acting resumed (the cast heroically professional), Trebell’s sister was required to say that life is “overrated”. In the circumstances, her words seemed outrageously bogus and made one suddenly intolerant of the play’s depressed character.
