★☆☆☆☆
At one point in this wild, incomprehensible tale, the local lord’s loyal retainer Heron snarls: “This is not Sodom! Or London! Or f***ing Norwich!”
If only it were, I thought, it would have to be better than this. We were trapped inside the Olivier, the big stage at the National, watching this new play by DC Moore that was so lost in some tangled bit of history set in deepest vaguest England that the only kind thing to do was send out an SOS.
It was lit as if we were in a Millet painting of harvest, all big sky and toiling villagers who, at various moments, put down their hoes to don animal masks and dance around, swaying as they sharpen their scythes in slow-mo. Their accents veer from cockney to the worst West Country ever. Sometimes they trudge round with little trees on their backs. Their leader, the harvest king, wears a wheat-sheaf headdress that looks like an upside down traffic cone having a hootenanny.
Anne-Marie Duff strides through this madness, in a little Red Riding Hood outfit. She is Mary, a former villager who has come back home to swagger, swear and seduce. If she were a man, she says, we’d call her a rogue. As she’s a woman, we can call her something else, starting with “c”.
Some say she’s the devil, fomenting rebellion about the Enclosure Acts while also bewitching the local drunkards and making lusty passes at her sort-of sister Laura (Cush Jumbo).
Advertisement
This play, directed by Jeremy Herrin, is a rustic tangle. There’s the lesbian romp strand which features, uniquely perhaps, a talking animated raven (the sub-Hardy equivalent of the pirate parrot). There’s the Millet villagers, trapped between superstition and revolt against the local lord (played with a fine sneer by Tim McMullan). Finally, flitting in and out, there are the politics.
The blurb describes this as “an epic tale of England’s lost land” but the only word that rings true is “lost”.
It is clear that, in previews, all has not been well. Just in the past few days, it appears to have been cut drastically, losing 30 minutes from its former three hours. But still the story feels disjointed, stolid and, at times, just very weird.
The set, by Richard Hudson, is atmospheric and Duff tries, at times heroically, to save the day, but it is simply not possible. I have no idea how Common made it this far, to be gracing our largest national stage, but it does not deserve to be here. Many left at the interval and I did not blame them.
Box office: 020 7452 3000, to August 5