Waste by Harley Granville Barker, at the Almeida Theatre, Islington
Will Keen as Henry Trebell and Peter Eyre as Lord Cantilupe. Photo: Johan Persson
Waste is a terrific play, and this was the best evening I've spent in the theatre for some time. In a sense it's a play about politics, at least about the high politics of parliamentary careers and ambitions; it's also a very personal play about how a man's drives can undermine all of him and destroy the best of him.
Henry Trebell is an independent MP - something that's become fashionable again lately, with Martin Bell and now Richard Taylor sitting in Parliament. But he's offered a place in a Conservative cabinet in order to take through the House a bill to disestablish the Church of England. It's a tremendous opportunity, politically: instead of merely impressing with his speeches, he'll be able to exercise real power and achieve serious social reform, perhaps propelling himself towards the very top of government. An opportunity Trebell seizes hungrily and sets about taking with enormous skill, as well as drive, identifying and recruiting the devout Cantilupe to reassure MPs who might be concerned about his own less religious motivations. Will Keen is I think fabulous as Trebell. It's a performance arguably mannered in its intensity, but I think that approach is entirely justified given the production's seriously period feel. Waste was written in 1907 but not performed until the 1930s - having been banned by the Lord Chamberlain, and Samuel West's production of the 1930s rewrite almost fetishises its period feel. The suits and dresses are fabulous, but it's not just that that I mean: everything about this play puts it in a particular time - a drawing-room, post-Wildean time of well-made plays and smart dialogue, somewhere between 1907 and 1936 - and the director has clearly decided to make the most of this and inhabit the period with relish. The starchiness, the strangeness, the self-consciously elitist attitudes of the characters make sense in this context, and I think Keen really convinces as an ambitious politician of his age. He drives this conviction right through to what might otherwise seem a ludicrously melodramatic ending - the fact that it doesn't shows how right the company were to back and believe in the world of the play so completely.
Trebell's energy and charisma are magnetic: and this is his downfall. We first see him after he's clearly decided to have as his mistress Amy O'Connell, played by Nancy Carroll. Have her he does, and its her pregnancy that puts Trebell's career, his ambition and his ideals in danger. And I mean ideals, because Trebell is not simply on the make. He truly believes he is doing important, historic work, and is determined to use disestablishment as a way of liberating religion, of making society more moral, not less, and most of all as a way of funding education through the sale of redundant church land. Education, education, education might well be his motto. In this I think Trebell is a very real politician, and reminded me of C. P. Snow's minister, Roger Quaife, in his 1964 novel Corridors of Power. Most politicians are idealists, those with drive, anyway, and want power for others' sake as well as their own. This, indeed, is the madness that makes you want power in the first place. I loved the whole treatment of politics in the play: we see a Prime Minister with a man's life in his hands, yet not so much all-powerful as resignedly constrained by the needs of party and faction; and we see important schemes dashed by the least idealistic weaknesses.
There are so many aspects of this play, and this production, that I could praise. The sharp, smart dialogue is at times difficult to follow, but is crackingly delivered and really grips you even when the play is least dramatic and most discursive. I can't understand how the West End Whingers even considered leaving at half-time, though I'm glad to say they agreed with me about the play in the end. Barker uses the perspective of the wronged Irishman O'Connell to show us how English the pragmatic hypocrisy of London't policial milieu is. There's a fair amount of food for thought about the position of women in the early twentieth century. And the cast and performances are just excellent - they're all worth seeing. I've already mentioned Will Keen, but Nancy Carroll, who was so outstanding in The Man of Mode last year at the National Theatre, was strong here too as Amy, as were all the supporting players. At first I was a little disappointed in what seemed Phoebe Nicholls's relatively flat performance as Trebell's wife, Frances, but she gained in power and energy as the play went on, as though saving herself for the intense final scenes, in which she blew away my doubts.
A very good play, then, and a very good production which is on till mid-November and deserves to go on longer. Barker was right that politicians can do real good if ability and motivation coincide; Roy Jenkins's abolition of theatre censorship in the 1960s is a good example, ensuring that a play like this will not go wasted again for thirty years. Michael Billington was quite right to call this a superb revival.
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