Holding Fire!

Holding Fire! at Shakespeare's Globe is one of two new plays on political subjects, squeezed in for 14 performances between the Shakespeare programme.  I love to see the Globe's fantastic space used to best advantage, and director Mark Rosenblatt delivers the goods, with groundlings scampering out of the way of a bare-knuckle prize fight and actors roaming the galleries.  The different levels of the theatre lend themselves to this kind of Upstairs, Downstairs story, which the actors attack with great vim and determination.  I particularly liked Peter Hamilton Dyer, who stands out among the cast of 18 and brings to life the Chartist leader William Lovett.  The fact that I found the play a bit underwhelming is due to Jack Shepherd's script, which failed to detonate.  The story of the Chartist movement is a big gap in my knowledge of British history, and I suspect I'm not the only one.  The problem in telling this kind of story in theatrical terms is that it's hard to find a convincing central character.  Shepherd invents a story about Lizzie, a street girl who becomes a scullerymaid in a mill owner's wealthy household, runs away and gets involved with the social upheavals of the Chartist movement.  There are some grating anachronisms in the dialogue and avoidable little errors;  Lizzie gets into trouble for taking the wrong wine from the cellar for a grand dinner, but anyone with a passing acquaintance with Mrs Beeton knows this task would have been handled by the butler, not an illiterate scullerymaid.   It's a historical pageant, a piece of episodic public theatre, in which characters appear too briefly for us to get to know them.  I began to feel that the sardonic and contrary Bertolt Brecht would have done it all much better, despite his dogmatic Marxism.  I never saw the RSC's famous Nicholas Nickelby, but I couldn't help thinking I was watching a Dickensian story without Dickensian characters.  Shepherd tries hard to stitch the story together but having your heart in the right place doesn't always make for good writing.  The toffs are nasty, the Methodists are hypocrites and the downtrodden workers are just like you and me, but the writing never really surprises. Always give the devil the best tunes is good advice.  Politically, the play's message seemed to be fuzzy.  Have the Chartists' demands been betrayed, as the gap between rich and poor widens again?   Or should we be rejoicing that things have got better?  In theatrical terms, I felt the play would have worked better with a bigger cast, more songs and ballads,  and lots of amateur participation in the crowd scenes.  It's the kind of panoramic community history play that really demands a cast of at least fifty.   In the world of music, amateur choirs and professional soloists perform together all the time.  Why can't this be done in the theatre?  The lines between professional and amateur theatre are so rigid that I can't see this ever happening.