Artefacts

Occasionally I go a bit green with envy when I come across the work of someone who writes much better than I do.  That's the feeling I got at the Bush theatre last night after watching this great new play by Mike Bartlett.  At its centre as the McGuffin is a an ancient broken pot, which comes to stand for broken history, a broken family and the broken relationship between Iraq and its foreign occupiers.  That makes it sound rather schematic, but this play isn't.  Mike Bartlett's many talents include the ability to tell a clear story without lots of exposition;  he has a technical skill with dialogue that enables the characters to switch seamlessly from talking to each other to talking to the audience while remaining totally believable.  And there's a stunning performance by Lizzy Watts in the main role.  It's only 80 minutes, and some writers would have laboured away to create a play two or three times this length. It never mentions politics, but tells you more about the Iraq war and why we got caught up in it than most plays which take an overtly political line.  Bartlett is very adept at stripping away the inessentials and concentrating on a human story.  The play centres on Kelly, a lippy London teenager brought up by a single mother and who has never had any contact with her Iraqi father, who walked out before she was born.  Kelly is a motormouth whose horizons don't stretch much further than reading Heat magazine and going shopping.  Iraq?  So boring!  Bartlett takes this character and confronts her with her father, whose brief visit to London sparks in her a series of conflicting reactions.  Her hostility gives way to curiosity and two years later, before going to university, she visits Baghdad to find her father and his Iraqi wife agonising over the kidnap of their teenage daughter by an armed gang seeking a ransom.  This is where the ancient pot -- originally smashed on the floor by Kelly and stuck together with superglue -- comes back into the story.  The dilemmas that the play explores are subtle ones -- how far the meaning of our lives and our loyalties are shaped by our own history, as individuals and as members of society.  Lizzy Watts is brilliant at capturing the airhead intensity of a girl whose mouth works faster than her brain, who tries to move outside her comfort zone but ultimately fails to connect. Just as a broken ancient pot can't be easily mended with superglue, a country broken apart can't be easily put back together either.  Neither can a family.  It's a bleak play but in places very funny, and the cramped surroundings of the Bush give it an extra intensity.  It's off on tour around England until May, so go and see it.  This production is the work of Nabokov, a fringe company who were also responsible for the excellent Terre Haute I saw at the Trafalgar Studios a few months ago.  Director James Grieve is a name to watch.