By David Edgar
Directed by Holly Race Roughan
Set & Costume design by Alex Lowde
Composer Monika Dalach Sayers
Royal Shakespeare Company
co-production with Headlong
The Other Place
Stratford-upon-Avon
Thursday 31st October 2024, 13.15
CAST
Daon Broni – Kenneth Holmes, a Harvard economist
Martina Laird – Rachel Moss, American political strategist
Lloyd Owen – Larry Yeates, , American political strategist
Patrycja Kujawska – Ludmilla Bezborodko, a campaign manager / candidate
Jodie McNee – Caro Wheeler, British polling specialist
Ziggy Heath- Oleg Sogolyev, a politics student
Edyta Budnik – Natalia Bezborodko, a business student. Daughter of Ludmilla
Roderick Hill – Petr Lutsevic, a presidential candidate
Sergo Vares – Leonid Zhudov, A Russian political strategist
Daon Broni – a reputation brand manager
Edyta Budnik also Natty, Tsaska, American waiter, airline steward, East European waiter
Ziggy Heath also Sasha, airline announcer, waiter in Michigan
All other parts members of the company (there are a lot of fleeting parts)
THE THEATRE (you can skip to the review, but if you intend to see it, I suggest you read it).
I like (or used to like) The Other Place, the RSC’s third theatre. We sometimes go there for coffee and cake when we’re in Stratford. We saw English there this May. That was on a standard ‘end of a rectangle’ stage. We sat in the auditorium. It was comfortable. We booked this play on the day members’ booking opened. The only available seating was ‘general admission.’ We had coffee before, I thought I could see a queue forming 40 minutes before it opened, but we were chatting. When we got up at 12.55 (20 minutes to go), the queue stretched out of the door across the courtyard and along the street. We dutifully joined the back. The bag search wasn’t holding it up at all. When we got to the front it was total chaos inside, everyone milling around looking for seats. Large clumps of seats had red reserved notices. We go to the back row stalls- no you need ‘high seat’ tickets. What? When we booked there were no high seat tickets mentioned. No reserved seats either. There aren’t any seats. Go back along the corridor and cross to the other side … there is a ‘sandwich stage’ along the middle with audiences both sides. Only seats there are front row, looking up sharply even to see actors feet, let alone faces. Go upstairs then. Sorry. This gallery is full. Go to the other gallery. Back downstairs. Cross to the other side. Back row only left. There is a wooden plank, that either traps my feet, or if I put my feet on, shoves my knees into the iron bars spaced at intervals. We move to the very end, where I can sit sideways. This is the worst seat at any production in years. The play starts. We can only see tops of heads and backs when they face the other side. We will NEVER book general admission with a sandwich stage again. First, they need to number the seats and assign tickets. It’s an issue with flexible theatre space, but The Bridge, Salisbury Playhouse, Southampton Nuffield, The Old Vic and the Young Vic have all managed to number seats while moving the space around. I felt sorry for the volunteers, all friendly and helpful, but the general admission plus sandwich stage is a disaster.
If you go, start queuing 45 minutes before the start.
THE STAGING
The sandwich stage. It probably worked in the stalls. But why? What is the point? It’s not predicated in the play text. The Old Vic once used it for A View From The Bridge. It was OK but looked daft set in a traditional proscenium theatre. The Young Vic used it for Yerma. It worked. Salisbury used it for one whole season, basically utilising the back half of the stage for extra seating. However, I see no point whatsoever. Actors are not playing forwards, or in the round, or to three sides as on a thrust stage. It’s like tennis: to the left, or to the right. There’s never a ‘to the front.’ It’s a really stupid idea. It feels unnatural. It adds nothing. Then how do you tour it? Which provincial theatres will find it worth reconfiguring the seating for a week, even if they can?
There are video projection screens in two segments. The lower half is raised to reveal the stage, lowered for set changes. The top half remains to form a photographic set. A hotel lobby, an airport, the presidential palace, a toilet. They can also be used for video, as when they watch a VHS tape, or we see collages, politicians who are part of the story making speeches, demonstrations or Putin and ruined Ukraine towns.
That worked well in the first act. In the second the bottom half on the one opposite us stuck down. They had to stop the play, lift it and announce they wouldn’t be using the bottom half anymore. After the trouble getting in and the appalling seats and view, the words couldn’t / organize / piss-up / brewery sprang to mind.
THE PLAY
It’s David Edgar. His How To Make A Play was in the Oxfam bookshop we went in on the way to the theatre. No comment.
Actually, I really want to see it again. Keep the cast, but really ditch that sandwich stage. It will work, with video screens on a proscenium stage. They won’t be able to obscure scene changing on a thrust stage, or a semi-circular stage like Chichester’s Minerva, but then they couldn’t in Act Two and it didn’t matter. I think it would be vastly improved somewhere like The Minerva. Given we mainly saw tops of heads, backs, and there were some strong accents we missed a lot of it.
So here we are. The programme points out that 50% of countries have elections this year. The big one is in just a week after we see the play.
It spans 24 years. Rachel (Martina Laird) and Larry (Lloyd Owen) are professional political strategists. We see them at the start working together. They have just lost the 2000 election working for the Democrats. Liberal views (gay marriage) had screwed them, though as ever the Electoral College’s heavy Republican weighting meant that Al Gore had the larger popular vote but George W. Bush won. Compare Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump in 2016. The bias was built in during the late 19th century with a clutch of states with large areas and tiny populations created. Each state has two electors for its senators, plus one for each congressman. California has a population of 38.9 million and two senators. Wyoming has 577,000. Vermont has 647,000. Alaska has 773,000. North Dakota has 783,000. Each has two senators. While the elector per congress district is broadly representative of population, it gives the Republicans a major electoral advantage. So in 2016 Hilary Clinton got 65,844, 954 popular votes. Trump got 62,979,879. Her 2.1% margin meant she still lost.
Rachel is interesting casting / hairdressing. She really does look like Kamala Harris. Her mother was a Freedom Rider.
Larry Yeates comes from blue collar rust-belt Flint, Michigan. This will come out increasingly as Larry develops a Populist strategy. They talk about Berkeley versus Flint. Academic California versus Rust Belt Mid West. Kamala Harris was born in Oakland and grew up in Berkeley. Berkeley, with its university, borders Oakland.
Early on, we meet Natalia Bezborodko (Edyta Budnik ) who is studying business in the USA. She meets Oleg Sogolyev (Ziggy Heath), also from her country who in contrast is studying politics. This will reappear. These two play a large number of minor roles also.
The play mainly takes place in Natalia’s un-named Eastern European country. One that has seen first fascism, then fifty years of Russian occupation and communism. We are spoiled for choice. It uses the Cyrillic alphabet, and the programme credits a Bulgarian language tutor. It’s nowhere specific. Later there are strong hints of Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, and Hungary was Fascist in World War II.
Rachel is employed to advise on political strategy, taking British pollster Caro Wheeler (Jodie McNee) who describes herself as a vegan lesbian … but from Rotherham. Importantly, British rust belt. Red Wall territory.
Petr Lutsevic (Roderick Hill) is the presidential candidate against an old ex-communist incumbent. Ludmilla Bezborodko ( Patrycja Kujawska) is his campaign manager. The odds are against them as the old regime creates lots of fake partes to split the opposition vote. They will decide that she is more personable than Lutsevic, and will persuade him to stand down in favour of her. Note that her surname is most common in Ukraine.
She has a signed copy of Margaret Thatcher’s book. There is a lot in the play on the election and creating an image ‘the Sunflower revolution.’ The projected film footage is elaborate. I have no idea of how they did it- and they did it very well too.
There are some good humorous sections, such as a political strategy meeting inside a church because it’s only 10 metres from the border for escape, with the priest walking through and the women racing to cover their heads
Ludmilla will become President and a power-dressed stiletto-heeled one too. She represents the ‘laptops and lattes’ generation in Europe. The liberal elite, if you like. Pro-European integration. A wonderful piece, the best thing in the play, is when they realise they can use the Eurovision Song Contest as a political tool- European integration., LGBT-friendly, youth appeal, YouTube generation.
However, Petr Lutsevic plans a comeback, and employs Larry Yeates, thus pitting Larry versus Rachel. Yeates arrives to be presented with the national breakfast dish … cow’s stomach in goose fat. It reminded me of a conference in Poland circa 1990. The main dish was tripe in beetroot sauce. We declined it and repaired to our room to eat biscuits instead. It’s a good comedy scene.
This is where Larry reaches back to his rust belt origins and sells his idea of making a populist appeal to the areas of the country inhabited by the tattooed, disgruntled, the unemployed… and I go, ‘OmiGod … J.D. Vance!’ Trump’s vice-presidential candidate was the author of Hillbilly Elegy about his poverty-stricken Ohio childhood. So I’m thinking this is Kamala Harris versus J.D. Vance. I guess they could do Trump, but that would be too over the top. I can’t see Trump as a credible character in anything, whether it be The White House or a Stratford stage. Simply unbelievable. Too absurd.
There’s more to it. As Yeates persuades Lutsevic to go for the “laptop lattes” who support Ludmilla, he also persuades him to attack the Shaeffer Educational Foundation which has been promoting technocratic liberal ideas, justice and human rights. Shaeffer is a billionaire philanthropist. Rachel susses immediately that the Jewish name ‘Shaeffer’ is giving Lutsevic a path to using anti-Semitism (a long tradition in the country) to promote a populist anti-immigration, anti-European campaign. This is where the hints of Hungary rear up into direct parallels. George Soros spent hundreds of millions of dollars financing education and civil society projects in Hungary, which included Viktor Orbán’s education. My first textbook series came out in a Hungarian edition in 1988, subsidised by Soros to make it affordable for secondary schools. Orbán turned against Soros in 2017. Soros was born in Hungary, lived under the Nazis, is an American businessman and a non-religious Jew.
When they talk about manipulating the rust belt, it’s all too much for Caro. It’s her background too. Think of Boris Johnson garnering votes in those areas.
When we see Lutsevic as president, he has a Putin length white table in the presidential palace and they sit at the extreme narrow ends, well apart. He has a rifle – a present from Queen Elizabeth. He asks Larry if he wants to ‘come and kill animals.’ This rang bells. My son studied martial arts in China. A fellow student invited him to Khazakstan where they could go wolf-hunting … from the back of a four cab truck with machine guns. My son declined
We also notice that Natalia, Ludmilla’s daughter, switches to ‘folk dress’ to help her mother’s campaign. We realize that Leonid Zhudov, who pops up frequently, is actually working for Russia. It will end with Putin and projections of the ruins of Ukraine.
Yes. I believed all the characters. The play is worth it. I bought the text.
PLAY / ACTING
****
SANDWICH STAGING / RSC ORGANIZATION (most unusually)
*
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
five star
Morning star *****
four star
The Stage ****
Midlands What’s On ****
LINKS ON THIS BLOG
HOLLY RACE ROUGHAN (Director)
The House Party by Laura Thomas, Chichester 2024
A View From The Bridge, Chichester 2023
Hedda Tesman, Chichester 2019
MARTINA LAIRD
All’s Well That Ends Well, Wanamaker Playhouse 2018
Coriolanus – RSC, 2017
Romeo & Juliet, Globe 2017
ZIGGY HEATH
French Without Tears by Terence Rattigan, ETT, Poole 2016
JODIE MCNEE
Venice Preserved by Otway, RSC 2019 (Belvedera)
Measure for Measure, RSC 2012 (Isabella)
SERGO VARES
The Winter’s Tale, Wanamaker& Globe, 2023 (Leontes)
Hamlet, Barbican 2015 (Fortinbras)
Peter Viney's Blog 
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