Playing With Fire
Olivier, London SE1
Hair
Gate, London W11
The Dragons' Trilogy
Barbican, London EC2
In fifty years' time, when people want to know what it felt like to live in the early years of this century, they'll be able to learn a lot from the plays on in London this week. In Mike Leigh's Two Thousand Years, they'll watch a clever family, battered by history, making sense of current events. In the Tricycle's Bloody Sunday, they'll see how institutions dealt with a political crisis. Both plays sink a deep shaft into British experience, entering it through an apparently narrow focus.
Unlike Playing with Fire. David Edgar's new drama looks at Blair's Britain head-on: it's a state-of-the-nation play of the kind that we haven't seen much of recently, large-scale and topic-stuffed. And lifeless. This is a play which says that politicians spend too much time bombing problems from airy citadels, but which doesn't itself show what's happening on the ground, only what people are saying about it in council chambers. Where there should be drama, there is exposition.
A new Labour trouble-shooter is sent oop north to sort out a failing council. She wears a dapper little suit and is full of 'diversity criteria' talk; her aims are a really good website and greater representation for the town's substantial Asian population. The northerners, old Labour to a man, include a lady mayoress in a pink hat who can barely stumble through a prepared speech, and a codger with mutton-chop whiskers who claims not to know what 'obviate' means. They're well-intentioned but hidebound, busy putting bathrooms into condemned properties.
There's a nod to the notion that everyone's living up to a stereotype - that here are the received truths of a thousand 'guacomole versus mushy peas' features - but a nod isn't enough to convert caricatures into characters. Nor, in a second half which abruptly changes gear, are multiple explanations enough to bring clarity.
We learn that, though a compromise between old and new Labour has been reached in the council, the real difficulties of the city haven't been touched: it's become divided along racial lines; there's been a murder, a riot, the rise of a party of the extreme right. Most of this is gleaned from the lengthy proceedings of a judicial inquiry. The rioters are glimpsed only briefly, as if they existed to provide the subject of a debate.
Steeped in research, alive to current events, determinedly fair-minded, this should have been a vital play. Instead, it shows how easy it is for state-of-the-nation drama to look like cut-up newsprint walking around the stage. Michael Attenborough's production does little to ease its pain. It's both too slow and too perky. There's a nasty moment at the beginning when it looks as if a group of overalled women is going to burst into song.
A strong cast, which includes Paul Bhattacharjee, Emma Fielding, Oliver Ford Davies and David Troughton, breaks the habits of their acting careers, becoming mouthy and shouty. It's as if they are willing vigour into the action.
Hair is never going to make sense. After all, this is the show that contains 'tooby ooby walla'. Still, sense was never its point: it was about sniffing and smoking and smiling and grinding and getting your kit off, and about how no one over the age of 40, especially not someone who sent people to war, would understand any of that.
Thirty-eight years after the musical was first staged, Daniel Kramer's updated version, in which opposition to the war in Iraq substitutes for resistance to the Vietnam draft, gets all the nonsense, but converts the hippy-skinny-dippy ethos of the original into a post-naive America where rage is the keynote.
Kramer, one of the most distinctive directors to have hit the stage in the last decade, has created something between a carnival and a dance of death. A young cast performs with glorious abandon. Golda Rosheuvel ...#65279;is outstanding. There's scarcely a moment when something explosive isn't happening.
The dancing is spiky and wild, with lots of shag breaks. The singing is ferocious, miked up so that the tiny Gate almost cracks with the sound: 'Let the Sunshine in', sung by weeping cast members as they carry the body of their friend in a coffin, becomes a battle cry. Oprah and Condie and Bush strut around in masks and wooden wigs. Two empty suits of clothes, with loudspeakers where their larynxes would be, are wheeled on to represent Mr and Mrs Middle America.
And yes, they do get their kit off. Twice, actually - once in a vaulting, leaping tangle of limbs; once as shuffling sack-over-the-head prisoners of war. If you don't like contemplating someone else's navel, don't sit in the front row.
First staged in 1985, The Dragons' Trilogy has now been revived as part of the Young Vic's Young Genius ...#65279;season. Robert Lepage, director, designer, performer and playwright, created it when he was 27 and it was the making of his reputation.
You can just about see why. The story, in which Orient and Occident meet in the history of two Quebecois cousins and their families, is told in French, in English, in Mandarin. It is danced, t'ai chi-ed and sung. It's full of ingenious, onstage transformations. It has a nun standing up and spouting in the basket of a speeding bicycle.
It is diverting to look at. Staged in a posh sandpit, with separate episodes picked out by spotlight amid the prevailing darkness, it features such set-piece spectaculars as a giant paper dragon which barrels lightly over the stage and a cream-coloured ship which collapses like a Venetian blind. But it's hard to believe that this can ever have seemed much more than a decorative soap opera. The relationships are obvious; there are no interesting sentences coming out of people's mouths. And it lasts for five-and-a- half hours.
