Landscape With Weapon

Denys Lasdun's unlovable concrete bunker on the South Bank has to be the ideal place to see a play about a man who invents a new weapons guidance system that will penetrate bunkers and caves.  I never saw Joe Penhall's much-praised play Blue/Orange and I came to Landscape with Weapon with my expectations dimmed by some dismissive reviews.  But I went away impressed;  this is certainly one of the best pieces of new writing I've seen in the Cottesloe for some time. This play has a cracking cast with Tom Hollander as the weapons designer and Julian Rhind-Tutt as his brother, backed up by Pippa Haywood as a steely businesswoman and Jason Watkins as a jocular but threatening spook.  The director is Roger Michell and though it's a talk-talk play with a very simple set, there are some lovely moments where less turns out to be more.  Jason Watkins prepares to question Rhind-Tutt about his missing brother's whereabouts by slowly unbuttoning his shirt cuffs and rolling up his sleeves, conveying a nice hint of controlled menace.  The core of the play is the relationship between the brothers, who move convincingly between joky familiarity, adolescent point-scoring, violent argument and finally compassion.  The landscape is one of moral ambiguities, and I like the subtle way Penhall explores them.  In the pre-show Platform discussion, Penhall told us: 'If you've got a brain you end up being ambivalent about most things'.  It's the people who know they're right and everyone else is wrong who should make us suspicious -- an idea I agree with.  Ned the weapons designer may seem naive in thinking he can keep control of his invention and how it is used, but Hollander makes this geeky figure quite convincing.  Penhall assured us that his depiction of the world of intellectual property and weapons development is based on knowledge acquired from a close friend.  However, I wonder how plausible it is to show Ned as owning the intellectual property to the software he has designed when he is a salaried employee who can be sacked.  For me, that was the only clunky moment in the plot.  Penhall writes cracking dialogue and has a knack for scenes that involve some kind of interrogation.  On the moral issues he manages to be scrupulously fair to all sides and avoids the pitfall of trying to write a journalistic play about the Iraq war.  As he pointed out to us, other professions such as doctors and lawyers manage to divorce themselves professionally from the consequences of their actions.  Why should weapons designers be singled out?  Should Kalashnikov be blamed for all the victims shot with the gun he designed?  And might 'smart' weapons potentially save lives if they are an alternative to dropping tons of high explosive?  Penhall doesn't come up with pat answers to the questions he poses but he creates convincing characters. 

Comments

[ellen]

you wrote, in your last post:

The real problem of the British theatre, IMHO, is a lack of good new plays. There are plenty of mediocre ones around (written by men and women), and over-praising them isn't going to help anyone.

So why are you doing exactly that here?

OK, the acting is good, and the dialogue is sharp and idiomatic - but there's no direction or intensity in the characters. You don't believe what they say and do. (Do you really think that a weapons designer would know so little about the conditions of his own job? (Or that an entire scene that only reveals that he doesn't is somehow good theatre?) Or that there isn't enough leeway in the argument about whether designing weapons is a good thing to allow two close brothers to bypass the argument? ) The arguments the characters deliver at such great length are set at pub-bore level. There's not much action, and little in the play that creates an emotional commitment (either for character or audience) that might set all the discussion on fire. Nearly all good plays have depth, complexity, truth of character, and emotional intensity. This play is thin, strained, tedious and lazily written.