What is with all these plays about men behaving badly?
Some messy thoughts about Manhunt, Giant and Punch. An excellent interview with Conor McPherson. An oral history of Sondheim's last musical. All in this week's belated Shouts and Murmurs.
Hello, and welcome to Shouts and Murmurs, a weekly round-up of theatre news, reviews, interviews and more from The Crush Bar, written by Fergus Morgan.
Firstly, sorry that this newsletter is a) a day late, b) missing a review round-up, and c) probably totally incoherent. I had some horrendous flu thing last week that has done something strange to my brain and made it very hard to concentrate on anything, let alone string a sentence together. Normal service will be resumed on Friday, hopefully, and I will do a bumper issue of Shouts and Murmurs next Tuesday to make up.
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Previously in The Crush Bar:
London is full of plays with one-word titles about men behaving extremely badly.
Rob Icke’s Manhunt, which imagines a posthumous trial for Raoul Moat, is currently running at the Royal Court Theatre. James Graham’s Punch, which dramatises the experiences of Jacob Dunne, is still on at the Young Vic and will transfer to the West End in September. And Mark Rosenblatt’s Giant, which explores Roald Dahl’s antisemitic attitude, will start performances at the Harold Pinter Theatre on Saturday, fresh from winning three Olivier Awards for its run at the Royal Court last year.
Those are not the only plays about masculinity around at the moment. We could throw Patrick Marber’s all-male poker drama Dealer’s Choice, currently in previews at the Donmar Warehouse, into the mix, too, and Shakespeare’s notoriously bloody Titus Andronicus, which opens at the Royal Shakespeare Company next week with Simon Russell Beale in the title role. And it is not just theatre that seems preoccupied with putting awful men under the microscope, either. Television is at it as well. Netflix’s Adolescence followed the fallout from a teenage boy being arrested for murdering a classmate, and HBO’s The White Lotus featured a rogue’s gallery of guys doing things they shouldn’t, like attempting to kill their whole family with poisoned pina coladas.
What is going on here? Is anything going on here? Am I just doing that glib, journalistic thing of mentioning a bunch of vaguely related projects and throwing my hands in the air? Well, yes, a bit. And the glib, journalistic answer would be to point to the current crop of self-aggrandising sociopaths wrecking the global economy, the post-war geopolitical entente, and the last half-century of social progress, and suggest that little ol’ theatre is rolling up its sleeves to get to the bottom of it all. Yes, we will all be savaged by marauding gangs of alt-right cannibals in the coming nuclear winter, but, thanks to James Graham, we will have a deep and satisfying appreciation of why.
The mundane truth, though, is that it was ever thus. Throughout the history of theatre, from Aeschylus’ Oresteia to Edward Bond’s Saved and beyond, playwrights have felt compelled to consider the mindsets of men that do terrible things. Icke, Rosenblatt and Graham are just the latest three dramatists to dip their quills in that particular well, Manhunt, Punch, and Giant just the latest three essays in a millennia-old theatrical tradition of trying to work out exactly what is wrong with blokes.
Do any of them get anywhere? Well, both Punch and Giant have earned West End transfers, if that signifies anything, and I think there is a strong chance Manhunt will as well, as Icke’s work tends to nowadays: that would be another feather in the cap of David Byrne. The reviews for all three plays were generally positive, too, but not universally so. With Manhunt, critics enjoyed the theatrical brio of Icke’s play but thought it was not as precise as his other work. With Giant, reviews appreciated Rosenblatt “going there” in staging a debate about antisemitism, but found its structure a bit old-fashioned. And with Punch, critics appreciated the scope, empathy and emotion Graham brought to the story but felt it was a bit heavy-handed.
The situation for all three plays is complicated by the fact they are about real people, whose actions led to real consequences and real victims. Manhunt seems to have fallen foul of that a bit. Last week, Sue Sim, who was Northumbria’s chief constable at the time of Moat’s crimes, aired her concerns about the play turning those traumatic events into “titillation.” Natasha Tripney suggested something similar in her Substack Café Europa last week, too, observing that Icke’s play suffered from a “muddiness of intention” and wondering whether Icke’s attempt to understand Moat - he told The FT’s Sarah Hemming that he was prompted to write the play after hearing David Cameron simplistically dismiss Moat as “a monster, pure and simple” - had landed uncomfortably close to accepting his own self-mythologisation.
If Manhunt runs into the problem of humanising its subject too much - and I’ll have to take Tripney’s word for that, as I’ve not seen it - then Giant has the opposite problem. Of course, it puts a very different story on stage to Manhunt or Punch but, at its heart, Rosenblatt’s play offers something similar: a portrait of a man behaving badly. Over a two-hour literary lunch set in 1983, John Lithgow’s whining, wheedling Dahl gleefully drags his publishers into a difficult debate about Israel, during which he gives full voice to his abhorrent antisemitism. I saw it last year at the Royal Court, and I was a bit underwhelmed. What frustrated me was how disinterested it seemed to be in digging underneath the surface of Dahl’s views and understanding him as a person. All it does is present Dahl behaving badly: it never interrogates why. It has a topical thrill, sure, but it does not seem to move the conversation on in any meaningful way.
I was far more impressed by Graham’s Punch, which focuses on the story of Jacob Dunne, the young man that killed James Hodgkinson with a single punch in Nottingham in 2011. David Shields’ central performance is angsty and animated and Adam Penford’s staging, originally seen at Nottingham Playhouse, is propulsive and kinetic. Best of all, though, Graham eschews a sensationalist retelling of Dunne’s story in favour of framing it as a compelling state-of-the-nation study of the societal factors that drove him and a moving exploration of the power of restorative justice. His play empathises with its main character without aggrandising him. It focuses on those that suffered as a result of Dunne’s crime, particularly Hodgkinson’s parents, just as much as it focused on Dunne. And, although it is concerned with the reasons why Dunne did what he did, it is also interested in how we can move forward. It exhibits that old adage about good playwriting: its main character changes over the course of the play.
It seems to me that telling stories about men doing terrible things on stage is a careful balancing act, and a particularly difficult one when it comes to real people. If you are going to do it, you have to practice empathy and understanding but avoid acceptance and aggrandisement. You have to centre their reality without ignoring the experiences of others, particularly their victims. You have to be curious about the conditions that contributed to their behaviour, while also mindful that millions of others experience the same factors and do not do terrible things. And you have to also be conscious of the fact that you are going where hundreds of dramatists have gone before.
In other news: Jeff Bezos went to see You Me Bum Bum Train; subsidised theatres contributed £1.35 billion to the economy in 2023; West End audiences are driven by word-of-mouth, famous actors, and familiar titles; Battersea Arts Centre executive director Amy Vaughan is stepping down; don’t applaud Gary Oldman!