The Glass Room by Ryan Craig is the third play I've seen at the Hampstead Theatre in the last three months, and it's the second one which seeks to compensate for third-rate writing by pressing the button marked 'Holocaust' to deliver an emotional charge. Perhaps Anthony Clark the artistic director feels that plays with big Holocaust speech in Act Two provide a surefire way of putting bums on seats in northwest London. On Friday night the theatre was only half full. But I seem to detect a pattern; the glossy and beautiful Hampstead theatre seems to be consistently overestimating the quality of its new plays. I was left pining for the tiny over-the-pub Bush theatre where I've seen two plays by Steve Thompson -- Damages and Whipping It Up -- which are far better than anything Hampstead can offer.
This play isn't quite as bad as Everything Is Illuminated, but it shares some of the same themes and the same flaws. Both authors are exploring big themes -- themes don't come much bigger than the Holocaust and Jewish identity. Craig's premise is a good one. Myles, a bright lawyer in London, is defending Elena, a historian accused of denying the Holocaust. On the way he tangles with Tara, his young journalist landlady, with whom he shares a flat, and his Jewish father Pete. The play attempts to explore the issue of free speech but gets bogged down in historical argument over the gas chambers between lawyer and client. Ryan Craig has mostly written for television, and I'm afraid it shows in the superficiality of this play and its phoney emotions. Elena, played by the hugely experienced Sian Thomas, is a pantomime antisemitic villain who comprehensively loses all the arguments and finally implodes. George Bernard Shaw understood that plays work best if the villains have the best speeches and win the arguments, but Craig loads the dice so heavily against Elena that she never has a chance. Sian Thomas overacts trying to rescue an impossible part and delivers the most OTT performance I have seen since I watched Gemma Jones in Everything Is Illuminated deliver the Holocaust Speech. In The Glass Room the Holocaust Speech comes from Pete, repeating a story told by his father about the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938 about Jewish babies being thrown on bonfires to be burned alive.
The plotting of the play creaks alarmingly. Craig is writing a play involving a journalist (Tara) and a lawyer but doesn't appear to know anything much about what they do. He hasn't made up his mind whether Myles is a solicitor or a barrister, and he invents a non-existent new law which makes it illegal to deny the Holocaust. On their own, these elements don't stretch plausibility too much, but there's worse to come. Elena is being held before her trial under a bizarre form of house arrest, neither at liberty nor in custody but in a secret safe house that she cannot leave. This device is needed so that Tara, a journalist on the Mirror's agony aunt page, can use the telephone to interview Elena behind Myles's back and splash her bizarre views all over the newspaper.
Neither Craig, nor the director, nor the Hampstead Theatre's literary manager appear to have heard of contempt of court. Even if a journalist were foolish enough to do an interview with a suspect before a criminal trial, no newspaper could ever print it. It's a ludicrous mistake, and somebody should have spotted it at an early stage.
The debate scenes between Elena and Myles have their good moments. Myles is convincingly played by Daniel Weyman, and he's the best thing by far in this production. The humdrum domestic scenes between uptight Myles and sloppy, shaggable Tara begin reasonably well but never take off. When the two characters suddenly end up in a clinch, the ground hasn't been properly prepared and the result is bathos.
According to the programme, Ryan Craig is part of a writing group known as the Monsterists who believe in big plays to tackle big issues. I'd raise a glass to that ambitious goal if there was any sense that The Glass Room was going to achieve it.
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