The music is good, but a new musical about the Gunpowder Plot lacks direction, says Ferdie Rous.
In Treason, we have another musical about a struggle for freedom. After Les Mis nearly 40 years on and the global phenomenon that is Hamilton, it’s fair to say that making a song and dance about fighting tyranny is a pretty safe box office bet. Unlike these two fore-runners, it is written from the losing side of history.
And it really leans into the tragedy of the failure of its protagonists through Guy Fawkes, who is narrator, judge and victim of what turns out to be a very political parable. Gabriel Akamo plays this warrior-conspirator with as much gravity as the script allows him. Wandering through every scene, he holds court about the inevitability of his fate and the need to remember this grave image of tyranny unpunished.
Alongside this omnipresent narrator, the main body of the plot takes his fellow conspirator Thomas Percy and his wife Martha Wright for its principal protagonists.
Opening with his wedding to Martha, Thomas is written as a happy-go-lucky somewhat oppressed Catholic everyman with a distinct dislike for Robert Catesby and his violent zealotry. Increasingly concerned with the repression of English Catholics, Thomas travels to Bonnie Scotland to seek out James VI. Somewhat reassured by the future king’s promises to protect his fellow believers, Thomas returns home. But when James goes back on his word, and personal tragedy ensues directly from it, he is driven into the open arms of Catesby and his mob.
In the dignified dilapidation of the Alexandra Palace theatre, the cost-umes and sets shine. The tall boots, loose shirts and leathery hose of the plotters give them a fittingly piratical look. The garb, however, is rather at war with its wearers. These would-be regicides have all the charisma of rebellious asparagi. With their distinctly 21st-century angst, their soliloquies dedicated to their private struggles put them more on a par with petulant protesters blocking Britain’s major roadways than with the daring conspirators they are meant to be.
With half an hour of torturous introspection from these agonised teens, I found myself rooting for the counter-plotter, torturer and villain-in-chief Robert Cecil. Where others are forced through long and hackneyed self-exposition, Cecil shows rather than tells who he is, and to much greater effect. This conniving manifestation of the sinister state with a fetish for Elizabeth I is played with evident relish by Oscar Conlon-Morrey who runs rings around James I with his crisply enunciated and sinisterly circuitous dialogue. With a few choice words, Cecil remoulds the hapless monarch from a defender of his mother’s faith into its staunchest enemy.
But in spite of Cecil’s valiant rear-guard action against the script, the Plot never really leaps off the stage. The wild rants about the overbreeding enemy hiding on British shores are worthier of Suella Braverman than of James I. The half-sung, half-rapped soliloquies about legal injustices heaped upon Catholics sounded more like a quickfire quiz about law than an impassioned plea for sympathy. And no matter how hard the chorus assaulted the set with extravagant choreography, they couldn’t disguise the fact that many of the play’s scenes consist of men and women talking across tables.
There’s just too much crammed into the story for it to be fully coherent. The characters don’t really have space to develop as the narrative rushes them through emotions which leave would-be poignant scenes rather empty of feeling. The personal struggles of the Percys and their entourage are delivered rather better than the Plot. Nicole Raquel Dennis (Martha) and Emilie Louise Israel (Anne Vaux) bring brilliant pathos to the pain of their family with their sensitive delivery and good vocals.
What really lets the show down is its lack of direction. A smattering of Latin and the odd condemnation of papists was deemed enough to justify the conspirators’ motives, while in a couple of scenes dominated by James’s demented ramblings about the occult, half-buried allusions to problems ranging from the cost of living to immigration and nods to Scottish independence are crowbarred in.
Pushed and pulled by this direction-less indignation, characters have to not so much change their minds as personalities as the play progresses. Trimming just a few of these scenes would give the plot more clarity, not to mention room to give the key conspirators a little more depth.
It’s a pity that Treason is so chaotic, because it has a lot of potential. Though it tries a little too hard to bring rap to the scene, much of the music is very good. “Blind Faith” stands out as a haunting duet between husband and wife, capturing the pained attempts of Martha and Thomas to reconcile as the plot leads them apart.
At the start of the play, the ghostly Fawkes promises a lesson on tyranny from down the years, which he urges the audience to “remember, remember”. Give it a year and a few tweaks to the pacing, and we might.
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