Ryan Craig won plaudits for What We Did to Weinstein last year, but The Glass Room, while it shows a similar determination to tackle big, burningly pertinent issues, is a disappointment. It’s impressively intelligent, yet dramatically it’s unexciting, with characterisation and plotting sacrificed to the over-explicit play of ideas.
Myles (Daniel Weyman) is a human-rights lawyer hired to defend Elena (Sian Thomas), a historian and Holocaust denier who, thanks to the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, is under house arrest. Elena insists that a healthy society must be permitted to question received truths, and uses a flamboyant contempt for the platitudes of political correctness to cloak her xenophobia and anti-Semitism.
Myles, meanwhile, is in a kind of denial himself; his father Pete (Fred Ridgeway) is Jewish, but he shies away from acknowledging his history and heritage. His avowed dedication to preserving free speech is further tested by Tara, his flatmate, a tabloid agony aunt who persistently stresses the emotional, human tangent to Myles’s principles.
Craig painstakingly builds Elena’s case before demolishing it in the avalanche of Myles’s overwhelming evidence and in Elena’s own rather overstated descent into rabid ranting. But it’s difficult to become involved with Anthony Clark’s production when the stage seems filled with walking mouthpieces. The dialogue and acting are self-conscious; great slabs of barely interrupted polemic are interspersed with sitcom-style scenes between the lovestruck Tara and Myles, which later slide into soapland with overwrought confrontation and highly dubious plot twists. And the structure of the play throughout is undermined by improbability: why would the conflicted Myles accept such a case? How does he keep it secret so long from his father, when Elena is a prominent media figure and Pete, who rarely descends from his soapbox, has such an avid interest in it?
Craig does point up the way in which society is increasingly divided; “I thought you were on my side,” wails Elena to Myles, while both he and Tara are guilty of detachment from the world that surrounds them — he from the personal, she from the political.
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And the play valuably questions the implications of dealing with repellant ideologies through legislation. But it’s too theatrically ineffective really to get us, or the debate, anywhere.
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