FringeReview UK 2024
The Constituent
Old Vic
Genre: Contemporary, Drama, New Writing, Political, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Old Vic, The Cut Waterloo
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Joe Penhall’s used the power of three before. His celebrated 2000 Blue/Orange, the eternal triangle of two psychiatrists assessing a patient, finds echoes in The Constituent directed by Matthew Warchus at the Old Vic till August 10th.
This extremely fine play is even more prescient than Penhall and Warchus intended, with an earlier election. The Constituent though, will survive it till August.
Director, Matthew Warchus, Set & Costume Design Rob Howell, Lighting Hugh Vanstone, Sound Simon Baker and Jay Jones, Voice Charlie Hughes-D’Aeth, Dialect Penny Dyer, Fights Terry King
Associate Director Oscar Toeman, Associate Set Bec Chippendale, Megan Rouse, Associate Costume Lucy Gaiger, Associate Lighting Sam Waddington, Hair, Wigs & Make-Up Campbell Young Associates, Props Supervisor Kate Margretts
CSM Ben Delfont, DSM Maria Gibbons, ASM Alice Jenkins
Till August 10th
Review
Joe Penhall’s used the power of three before. His celebrated 2000 Blue/Orange, the eternal triangle of two psychiatrists assessing a patient, finds echoes in The Constituent directed by Matthew Warchus at the Old Vic till August 10th.
Set in an MP’s surgery, compassionate Monica (Anna Maxwell Martin) is having her security fixed by Afghanistan army veteran Alec (James Corden), whom she knew briefly at school and whose mothers were friends.
Maxwell Martin unbends after a phone conversation, then finds reason to stiffen again. There’s her agent, her husband, one of her children. It starts affably, well within Corden’s comfort zone firing wit and bant above Alec’s pay grade: mark of a bright underachiever, something not quite explored.
“Most people can’t afford an alarm now. Can’t even afford the electricity.” Alec first sounds this note: a world of precarity laps around all three characters, along with stress and mental health. Alec palpably as his life unravels, but Monica too: under-resourced, over-stressed, not claiming expenses, bulk-ordering Ibuprofen. Even, as we find out, the Met – next to bottom in Alec’s security pecking order (Customs are bottom) – have problems.
Alec though, encouraged by Monica, soon confides things she can’t help with. His marriage ended, he’s denied access to his children. There’s allegations, a court order; not an MP’s domain.
Quite soon another security, police detail Mellor (Zachary Hart) is advising a complete break from Alec’s increasingly needy behaviour. As it spirals to violence you don’t expect, the wonder is Monica even engages. There’s a shocking incident with further consequences: the blame’s laid on Alec. All this further impacts on him too.
It’s not though as simple a case as disintegrating trust as violence rises. Each character – indeed the plot – undergoes reveals to swivel judgement around. Even Hart’s resoundingly judgemental policeman has a moment of agency in his underfunded, short-staffed world.
Penhall again finds a subtle way to explore the rescuer-victim-persecutor triangle, so consummately wrought in Blue/Orange. Again, it’s cast in a headlong 90 minutes. Here the less articulated link is Hart’s Mellor. Managing to squeeze some grizzle of humanity from him, Hart has an unenviable job, but conveys how an over-stretched brief has further imprisoned Mellor.
Monica won’t accede to the dictum that when it’s empathy versus fear, fear always wins. That’s despite Maxwell Martin exploding at one point.
Monica’s powers of psychic recuperation though seem almost superhuman. Nevertheless, subtly shifting her body, hardening and varying her voice with those encounters on the phone, Maxwell Martin breaks down on a call with Monica’s child. As pressures mount from the Party too, you begin to wonder whose mental health is most under strain.
“I’m trying to have a bit of empathy… I don’t want to be controlled by fear” Monica tells Mellor who tells her everyone is. Indeed Penhall portrays a genuinely fine MP, refusing to truck with the pervading cynicism. Monica’s focused on local issues round car parks, supermarkets, a child’s injury delivering results; not national ones.
Monica claims “I didn’t go into politics to shrug things off.” Yet when Alec brings box of gun cartridges into the room – for a reason – Monica warns him the police would shoot him. Shadows of murdered MPs are never that far off either.
Though it’s subtly clear that Monica’s a Labour MP, there’s nothing of James Graham’s massive fairness, David Hare’s angsty state-of-nation or Howard Brenton’s political piledriving here. The sheer locality of this encounter makes it – though contemporary – timeless and universal.
Corden’s part is easily the richest. Moving from the slapstick wit of his last stage role in One Man, Two Guvnors, his acutely aware but helplessly rage-imprisoned Alec seems plunging past a no-return signpost miles below hell.
Corden rises superbly and dangerously to this, so you never know where he might turn traumatised persecutor. At one point Alec ferociously counters Monica’s denial to his “You’re all the same, you politicians” by signing off with: ”Dead from the neck up. Dead behind the eyes. You’re a dead person in a dead Parliament in a dead country.” Yet there’s a slim way back.
It’s all played out in Rob Howell’s minimal set with table and two chairs, and little else, as the audience is arranged on both sides. Emphasising how slim this transactional world is, with its gleaming sterility (lit by Hugh Vanstone) is music from an age of police battles: Morrissey and Billy Bragg throb curiously from Simon Baker’s and Jay Jones’ sound envelope.
At the moment it seems right, with a UK angrier than at any time since then. Which makes this extremely fine play even more prescient than Penhall and Warchus intended, with an earlier election. The Constituent though will survive it till August. There’s just a little hope the Monicas of this world might too.
