Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? is a short work in eight choppy scenes. The two actors, Ty Burrell and Stephen Dillane, play, respectively, an American called Sam (Uncle Sam?) and an Englishman called Jack. They sit together on a sofa, strikingly suspended in midair over a darkened stage. Various positions are adopted, sometimes angry and separate, sometimes snuggling up cosily together, as they talk over the many fine details of their special relationship. Except this is no ordinary special relationship. The small talk of these lovers consists of broken, elliptical and deeply disturbing dialogue: “Bombing China, bombing Panama... bombing Peru, bombing... exhausting ... thrilling... love you more than I can... cluster bombs ... love the yellow... jagged steel shrapnel... soft targets.” There isn’t a single syntactically complete sentence. This sounds as if it could be pointlessly experimental and annoying, but somehow it works brilliantly.
The great drawback, as so often in contemporary theatre, is the politics. In their naivety and excitable inarticulacy, they strike you as barely adolescent, no matter where you stand on the spectrum. Rather than swimming against the tide, as good art should, and offering complexity, Drunk Enough... is contentedly in the swim. At its heart is the somewhat simplistic idea that America is the Great Satan. It has all the subtlety and nuance of a Friday prayer-meeting in Tehran. (The only other country criticised is Israel. Not Russia, China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma: just Israel.) It is all about America’s “hegemonic hyper-imperialism” or whatever; its huge, babyish greed for oil and influence. America alone is destroying the planet with its gas-guzzlers, and Sam’s response is: “Who f***ing cares?” It’s like the warblings of a sociology undergrad who’s sprinkled too much Noam Chomsky on her breakfast cereal.
The central conceit of Sam and Jack/George and Tony snuggling up together like lovers isn’t new. Spitting Image often showed Ronnie and Maggie in bed together. On telly, such a gag is called knockabout satire, whereas if you put it on a stage it’s called art. And I don’t know why Jack has to stop and take coke halfway through, or why a play that thinks itself so politically astute and globally aware can’t pronounce Laos properly, though it does care about how many bombs America dropped on the poor country:
Jack: “Go go go three million dead in Vietnam Laos Cambodia.”
Sam: “Two million tons of bombs on Laos now.”
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Without any historical context, such figures randomly thrown out are meaningless. However much America’s foreign dealings demand strong criticism at times, such stuff as this seems intended merely to give an audience a safely generalised feeling of the wickedness of America, and their own moral superiority to it.
Yet Churchill is such a supreme theatrical talent that even with this considerable handicap at its centre, this is still an enjoyable, original, often very funny evening. Burrell and Dillane are perfect in their roles, their lovers’ tiffs and sweet talks hilarious and creepy by turns. Sam the American is smarmy, bullying and deeply insecure, shouting about “things I need!” whenever his principles are questioned, while Jack the Englishman is mildly troubled in his conscience, but desperate to stay friends with his strong American friend rather than be sent packing to unglamorous, senile little old England.
Surely only Churchill could come up with such a loopily original, left-field and psychologically (if not politically) astute portrayal of the special relationship; and I especially loved the joke about Sam making Jack put his cigarette out just after dismissing global warming as “junk science”. There seems no limit to Churchill’s wit, invention and experimentation with forms of dialogue that on the page look doomed to fail, but in a theatre always work. If you can live with the fact that, once again, we have on a contemporary stage the idea that you can demonstrate what a good person you are by broadcasting at top volume your disapproval of America, then you will be entertained.
Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?
Royal Court, SW1, Three stars