Ten minutes in the sighing started. Like nuclear fallout, it slowly crept forward, invisible, deadly, from the back of the circle down to the front of the stalls, until it was time for the first interval and like irradiated hyenas we scrambled out of the theatre.
It's no wonder people are escaping at the first interval. The first act of Anne Washburn's bizarre new play - Mr Burns - sees a group of people who I didn't care about enough to even remember their names huddling around a campfire, in the middle of the night in the middle of a nuclear apocalypse, tediously recounting the famous The Simpsons episode Cape Feare. Line by line, scene by scene, they work forward, dully recounting lines of dialogue in bad impressions of Homer, Lisa, Bart and Marge. In a bold move, director Robert Icke has chosen to stage the first act in almost complete darkness, but it's too dark on stage to see the actor's faces clearly, so act one is more like listening to a radio play in a dark room.
One scene sees the stereotyped cardboard cutouts - the geek, the mysterious, shotgun wielding drifter who seldom speaks, the paranoid woman - monotonously read names of lost relatives out of blank notebooks. Would it really have been so hard to just write some names down on a page?
The only redeeming features are the subtle references to what caused the nuclear apocalypse, life after it (one character describes a town devoid of all life, another describes the stink of irradiated corpses) and the genuinely sinister arrival of a giggling madwoman, played by Jenna Russell.
The second act, thankfully, skips ahead seven years. How do we know about the time difference? Each act opens with an obviously unhappy Almeida steward holding up a cardboard sign denoting the name of the play (as if we didn't know) the playwright (whose work I wouldn't be too keen on seeing anytime soon), and the time period. It's all very Brecht.
In the second act, the group of travelers from the first act have now formed a theatre troupe and, using scripts purchased off the black market, stage and perform television shows and the commercials. A rival group, the Primetime Players have a huge cast, while one group dedicates itself to performing episodes of the West Wing.
Unlike the first act, subtlety isn't key here. One sections sees the cast perform a montage of classic songs a capella, from Britney Spears' Toxic to Daft Punk's Get Lucky. It's a brilliantly choreographed, exciting sequence, and the cast give it their all.
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| © Manuel Harlan |
I was genuinely unhappy when the second act finished. It really was great. It was a wonderful piece of post-apocalyptic black comedy, with a brilliant premise, great performances and a shocking and unexpected ending.
Act three really gets weird. And when I say "really weird" I actually mean "really really really weird". Because it was. Set seventy-five years after act two, The Simpsons is now mythic. Opening with a yellow-robe wearing Greek chorus singing Ricky Martin's Livin La Vida Loca in an operatic style, the cast reperform Cape Feare, now fit to bursting with references to Christ and the Nativity and Ancient Greek Legend. Bart (Jenna Russell) wears a leather breastplate, crown and wields a sword. Lisa wears a headdress not too different from the Statue of Liberty's. And Mr Burns - confusingly replacing Sideshow Bob as antagonist - has the thuggish Itchy and Scratchy as machete wielding minions.
This act, with beautiful music by Michael Henry and Fiona Digney with opera sung by Adey Grummet, is flat out confusing. I personally find it pretty unbelievable that it would only take seventy-five years for the show to receive mythic status and through Biblical imagery, Washburn may be attempting to show how ritualistic and revered religiously the show is, but this falls flat due to a complete lack of characterisation. It would have been far more effective to show, say, a family worshiping and discussing the show five hundred years into the future than only showing the ritual itself.
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| The Chorus Enters © Manuel Harlan |
There are genuinely some strong ideas inside Mr Burns. It's interesting and exciting with a beautiful score and evocative lighting by Philip Gladwell. However, it's hindered by a flat, turgid first act and unlikable characters. In contrast, act two is bold, funny and sad. And while act three provides no satisfying conclusion, it's complex and full of interesting metaphors and imagery.
It asks some tough questions and leaves us to answer them, and ultimately asks what will happen if the world as we know it really does end. Will humanity focus on the essential or finding comfort in the trivial?
Mr Burns is the latter. But could have been the former.
6/10
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