British theatre is in some kind of timewarp. It revives 40-year-old plays considered to be radical in their day as if they were modern classics. It treats the 1960s generation of left-wing dramatists, including Edward Bond, Harold Pinter, David Hare and Howard Brenton, as if they were beyond criticism. But we have moved on since those days, and they have not moved with us.
Jonathan Kent must have thought that it would come as a bit of a shock to offer Bond’s 1973 play The Sea during his season as artistic director at the Haymarket. This is the most Edwardian of London’s theatres, perfect for a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest; whereas Bond is a poet of the left, accustomed to wag an accusing finger at the middle classes that make up the bulk of the Haymarket’s audiences. Yet seeing the play—which runs until 19th April—brought no shock at all. It was as if this early warning against the perils of Thatcher, who when the play was first seen was known to the left as “milk-snatcher,” is what we have come to expect from the theatre.
The Sea is over the top and farcical, which may be why it is billed as a comedy. A grand lady, Mrs Rafi, ruins a haberdasher with her extravagant orders and failure to pay, until he turns mad, blaming aliens for the collapse of his business. It has one scene of mindless violence—Bond’s trademark. The shopkeeper ferociously stabs the corpse of a drowned man, mistaking him for a foreigner. The British class system, in short, is to blame for the ruin of the economy and the way in which we behave so aggressively towards others.
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