The beauty of Mike Bartlett’s plays is that they provide sharp insight into how some of the most pressing political and social forces are shaping our nation and our relationships with one another.
Albion, which has been revived at The Almeida this month, is Bartlett at his best. It’s a play that hinges on how we grapple with our past; how it can irrevocably shape our future and keep a maddening grip over our reality.
It’s an apt metaphor for how Brexit has been shaped by an idealised vision of England in the good old days of Merry England, and how this nostalgia for a beautiful past has gripped our nation into paralysis.
The play follows the Walters family, who have moved to an estate in rural England after their eldest son James was killed fighting in Iraq. Audrey Walters’ (Victoria Hamilton) resilient belief that this nation is built upon “strong ideas and principles” is embodied in her neurotic obsession with recreating the household of her descendant Wetherall, which includes replanting the entire garden as it would have been when he was alive.
The infiltration of the past into the present is incarnated in Mrs Walters scattering the ashes of her son in her garden. It’s a beautiful image of how the past and the future can be melded together in limbo, and how trying to take control over something beyond control can have disastrous consequences. Even James’ death, upon which the actions of the play’s characters hinge, is a sham: Audrey clutches to the patriotic belief that he died a hero, and she is reluctant to recognise the futility of his death.
The characters’ attempts to deny the present and clutch on to the past bring the play to a dizzying crescendo in the first half and a climactic shattering in the second. Events spiral out of Audrey’s control: her dreams are spooned out and all is left is the empty carcass of her withered garden.
There are no weak links in this cast; the dynamic of each relationship is crucial to the entire play. The central love story between Audrey’s daughter, Zara (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Audrey’s best friend (Helen Schlesinger) is a fresh and much-needed take on Call Me by Your Name-type affair between an older and younger woman; the sexual tension between the two is exhilarating and tantalising to watch.
High emotional energy occasionally sends the actors into distractedly frantic pacing of the stage, but the overall effect is gripping to watch. Hamilton makes a particularly outstanding performance as Mrs Walters: she brilliantly captures both Audrey’s manic and occasionally cruel characteristics, and the barely-masked insecurities which lie beneath.
The beauty of Bartlett’s writing is that it switches seamlessly between side-splitting humour and gut-wrenching emotion. The funniest lines are delivered by Mrs Walters’ second husband (Nicholas Rowe) with droll sarcasm and his passivity is a brilliantly funny counterpoint to Mrs Walters’ neuroticism.
There are a few questionable song choices that seem all-too obviously designed to pull on the heart strings: an original music score might have made those moments a little less generic. But that’s a small loss in an otherwise beautifully crafted performance.
Miriam Buether’s set design is visually epic: the Edenic garden, with a grand oak at its base, masterfully embodies the timeless and dream-like essence of the play itself; the theatrical illusion is intensified as actors plant and uproot the flowerbed on the outer edge of the stage at pivotal moments in the play; it’s a subtle marker of time passing and seasonal change, a difficult thing for directors to achieve without falling into the trap of obvious – usually physical theatre-driven – fillers.
Albion is a finely-wrought portrayal of the paralysing friction between a stagnant past and the attempt at regeneration. The play suggests that however much you try to recreate the past or control the present, nothing will span out the way you’d hoped. As Mrs Walters comments, “it turns out it’s not enough to have a dream.”
ALBION 01 Feb 2020 – 29 Feb 2020
At The Almeida Theatre, Islington
Almeida St
The Angel, London
N1 1TA
