Kate Mulley

In Sunday’s heatwave, I broke away from a day of birthday celebrations and culture to catch the new show at the Atlantic, Gabriel by Moira Buffini. It’s about a displaced family on the island of Guernsey (which was occupied by the Germans during World War II) and what they do when a naked stranger washes up on their shore. The play explores the role of women during an occupation when all the native men are fighting or dead and many of its moments are very poignant and subtle. It’s a fine play and the design is absolutely gorgeous, but I kept thinking that it was, perhaps, too earnest. And some of the actors seemed a little bit off with their lines, which always throws me. The play was produced at the Soho Theatre in 1997 and I’m not sure what the process behind putting it up here 13 years later was. Ever since my freshman year of college I’ve been very interested in the decision making behind “subsequent performances” and this is one that I would be interested to know, because either the cultural relevance is too subtle for me, or they just liked the play and wanted to do it.

In the meantime I’ve been reading Laura Wade’s play Posh because it arrived at the book shop last week and the cover image(on the left) is excellent. I’m pretty disappointed that I won’t be able to see it (and I highly doubt it’ll transfer across the Atlantic, it’s too timely and British), but reading it has been an absolute delight. It’s equal parts hilarious and scathing. I found myself laughing on the subway while reading it and horrified by other sections. There’s a good review of it that’s just been posted on the NY Times website, but it’s essentially about the members of an Oxford club (modeled, supposedly, after the club that David Cameron and George Osbourne were both in as students– though I’m sure there are others like it) on a night that they get together and get drunk and postulate on their position in the world and the decline of the Empire. It’s a state of the nation play, much like Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, but from a very different side of it.

I’m always intrigued by state of the nation plays, and while I’ve never really attempted to write one for America, I would like to try some day.

I’ve just returned from a trip to London where I caught three shows that were very tied to their native land.

Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art is a charming, well-staged play about art and theatre and creation and collaboration. Set as a play within a play, the action of the play takes place during one rehearsal of a new play about WH Auden and Benjamin Britten at the National Theatre, during which the director has left the stage manager in charge while he attends a conference in Leeds. The actors all have their issues with the play and the playwright. Bennett has an innate ability to create witty, quippy dialogue that made me laugh a lot (despite having gone almost right from Heathrow to the National). It’s also about how closeted sexuality changed  during the 20th century and the play is full of insightful bon mots. It’s a very National play. I sensed some self-congratulation amidst the audience (it was a Sunday matinee after all), but I probably was guilty of it myself. In fact, I was so charmed by the world Bennett created that I bought a signed copy of the play in the bookshop afterwards. Looking back on it a week later, I wonder what I found most moving about it or most powerful, and I cannot recall. The use of Britten’s music was appropriately moving and the acting and design were top-notch. But I kept thinking that this is not a play that could take New York by storm the way that The History Boys did, though, mostly because it’s a play so much about it’s own creation.

The next play I saw was Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. This too is a play that feels as much as an event created for its particular circumstances than anything else and I was disappointed to be seeing it in the West End as opposed at my beloved Royal Court. I had told my father that we were seeing the new English state of the nation play and at the end he said that if this is considered the state of the nation he was glad he wasn’t British. The play almost entirely belongs to Butterworth’s fantastical imagination and how it manifests itself in Johnny “Rooster” Byron, a rebellious, drug dealing squatter who lives in a trailer in a park in Wiltshire. He’s being evicted because of a new estate nearby. The play is chockful of literary, theatrical and regional references and is grand in its scope, but it really only captures one day in Rooster’s life, with his band of misfit children, his sad friend Ginger (of course he’s named Ginger), the local publican and others. In that way it’s actually very similar to The Habit of Art, the scope is grand and yet culturally specific and yet it only takes place during one day (St George’s Day, which is also Shakespeare’s birthday). It’s a stunner of a play, one that makes me want to be more ambitious and more brave with my own writing. I love when that happens.

On Wednesday and Thursday I had the pleasure of seeing Sarah Sigal’s Alice’s Adventures in the New World at the Old Red Lion(full disclosure, Sarah and I were roommates in London). The play follows Alice, a young Irish girl who finds out that her late mother is in fact not dead, but divorced, as she seeks out her mother on an adventure from Victorian London to the Wild West. It’s an all-female cast, an unapologetically feminist play and an absolute delight. I’m still humming songs from the play days later and found a second viewing to be enriching and illuminating (even though it was the result of a cancelled flight back to New York). With influences ranging from Brecht to Edith Wharton to Annie Oakley, the play deftly walks the line between comedy and pathos as the audience grows along with Alice, as she learns that becoming a woman is full of sacrifices and hard decisions. Sarah’s an American, as is the director Jessica Beck, so it’s a very clever piece about discovering life as an American in the UK/Ireland and the reverse. And I realized that if Sarah can write a musical, I can too.