Who owns a play? Is it the playwright who crafts it, the director who helps bring it to the stage or the actors who make the characters incarnate?
In this play about a play, the brash American lead actor and obsequious English director both attempt to shape the disputed work in their image on the eve of rehearsals. And in doing so they completely ignore the playwright who created the work. That she is female and they are both male is no accident.
Her play is set in the moral quagmire of The Troubles, and at one point she justifies the murder of innocent civilians. Compared to the comments of her two antagonists, this contribution is startlingly anodyne.
The English director consistently asserts the importance of the fictional play in a post-Brexit world, completely oblivious to the political situation in Northern Ireland or the intent of the playwright. But as the action plays out, it’s another neologism that emerges as far more pertinent – MeToo.
This is a play about the lengths that men in power will go to preserve their careers, their image and control over their own destiny even as they deprive women of that right. Their blithe statements provoke gasps from the audience, though more often the reaction is laughter – in itself problematic given some of the hideous content that they produce, which is too close to the truth to be parodic.
The descent into savagery is fast, but well paced. The two male characters’ protestations of feminism become louder and more vehement even as their actions contradict these claims. The ending is somewhat pat, but ultimately deserving as these clueless men claiming to be allies of the cause show just how little their lip service to feminism means.
Their personalities and backgrounds may be worlds apart but their motivation is the same, and the woman whose play they claim to care about is just another piece of collateral damage. That ‘Ulster American’ provokes laughter as often as it does is disturbing. That it rings so true is far scarier.
