Double Cross at The Lyric
Went to see Double Cross last night at the Lyric.
It's the story of two Irish men desperately trying not to be Irishmen, and the strangeness that comes with aping the English: the nasal bray, the tweedy clamminess, the permanent damp Sunday afternoon-ness of it all. The two men: Brendan Bracken and William Joyce, are, in a peculiar quirk of fate, pitted directly against each other in an information war: one as the British minister for information, the other as the infamous Lord Haw Haw. Its an extraordinary play: witty, fiery, angry - about twenty minutes too long - and horribly apt for these "interesting" times. It's also oddly nostalgic in a way that playwright, Thomas Kilroy, could not have foreseen when he wrote it in the 80's: we live in a world where the President of the United States tweets artless and poorly spelled bullshit all through the night. At least Bracken and Joyce were professionals!
When Brendan Bracken was Minister of Information a journalist told him, "Everything about you is phoney. Even your hair, which looks like a wig, isn't".
Brendan Bracken was his own work of fiction. He lived by the Epicurean dictum "Hide your life".
The son of a Tipperary stone-mason (and founder of the G.A.A.) he was a truant and trouble-maker who was shipped off to Australia to live with an uncle who was a priest. Upon his return he distanced himself from Ireland, shave four years off his age and presented himself at Sedbergh Public School in the West Riding of Yorkshire, pretending to be an Australian orphan with a family connection to the headmaster of Winchester College. He supported his career on a foundation of bullshit, by thinking fast and doing his research and staying one step ahead of everybody else. In the age of Fake News its a pleasure to witness someone lying so artfully and so well. Bracken was the liar's liar - his lies were as good as the truth.
We see him (played with tendon popping energy by Ian Toner) sat at his desk, alternating his phones and lying like someone had turned on a tap: gloriously, unselfconsciously, beautifully. It is lying as art. It is conversation as fencing. There is a French film - "Ridicule" - about the court of Versailles where social status could rise and fall based on your ability to mete out insults. One suspects Bracken would have fared well. He'd have been okay in a rap battle too.
His is the first half of the show and what a strange, plasticky thing it is: everything in Bracken's world is a fraud, except for the suave and avuncular Lord Beaverbrook (Sean Kearns, Canada dry) who is the only true bridge between the two men as he visits both. Bracken's environment is heightened, hysterical, his accent slipping, his logghorea unrelenting; he is his words and he invents the world with his words. His universe takes on the trappings of theatre: there is a Greek chorus, there is a taunting nemesis glaring down at him from a screen, there are farcical interludes with a girlfriend named Popsie: she dresses like a boy-scout to fire his ardor. There is a silly old ass, Lord Castlerock - "I'm Irish actually" - "the only problem with Hitler was he was frightfully common" - arsing around in a dressing gown and slippers. This is the Ministry of information by way of Greyfriars; the fight for the hearts and minds of the British people as orchestrated by one B. Wooster.
Toner is fantastic as Bracken: tense, wired, as tightly coiled as his hair and as smooth as an eel's belly. There is fire too. Bracken panics when Beaverbrook investigates his origins, he feels as if his tail is trapped in the door. He begs the publishing magnate to bury the file. It is one of the play's few wrong notes - Beaverbrook believes that the British public will love his rags to riches life story, Bracken wants to keep spinning the plates. He's right - the public might like the story, but the Establishment, his peers, would never forgive him.
By the end the lies have caught up with him. He is obsessed with his nemesis: the suave, unflappable Haw Haw, with his insinuations and his Teutonic dueling scar, and his monochrome grandeur, as monumental as the sculptures Bracken's father used to build, and as redolent as death. As the tension becomes too much he begins to unravel, in a performance of extraordinary physicality. Toner is remarkable.
The second half is very different in tone. William Joyce may be American by birth, Irish by default, English by design and German by political expediency, but he knows who he is. The play finds Joyce and his wife Margaret (Charlotte McCurry) living as German citizens in the dying days of the war, she teaching a romantic Anglophile buffoon called Erik (Kearns again, showing a shapely ankle in his plus fours) how to be an English gentlemen and Joyce still employed undermining and subverting the British people through his regular broadcasts. He is another man possessed by glossolalia, language pouring out of him unceasingly as through from a sluice. When he discovers a pragmatic affair between Margaret and Erik he talks unceasingly for twenty four hours. This is language as a blunt instrument, language as torture. He too is tormented by his opposite number. As he languishes in his cell Bracken appears like a phantom before him, taunting and pleading.
This is a fantastic piece of work and the cast are supremely confident, note perfect for press night. The play throws everything at them as they leap from monologue, to dialogue, to interacting with telephones, talking walls and a surprising amount of luggage. Nothing phases them: Toner is two different men in his dual role, physically changed: clammy and pleading as Bracken, hollow eyed and haunted as Joyce. It's a long play - too long - but his commitment never wavers. McCurry is wonderful as Joyce's Utopian fascist wife Margaret: plummy, clear-eyed, rampantly xenophobic, and bound to this increasingly frazzled man she has the misfortune to love. She conveys this magnificently. Sean Kearns, whether he's the internationally smooth Beaverbrook, a Blandings style silly bugger or an Ealing comedy every-man, lifts every scene. It takes real power to turn Erik, in his plus fours, and making sincere courtly love to Margaret, to Erik the trembling bellowing Nazi. They are both fools and both doomed, but Nazi Erik is a terrifying presence, the sneering, superior Joyce finally intimidated.
Ciaran Bagnall's set is, as we've come to expect, brilliantly conceived: elegant and functional, unveiling more and more surprises as the play continues, unfolding like the protagonists. Jimmy Fay's direction is utterly fastidious and the play horribly timely - in a week where the fucking BBC discuss Tommy Robinson at length under a picture of the little thug with a gag over his mouth - the irony apparently lost - we need plays like Thomas Kilroy's "rage against the whole nature of fascism"; its dissection of nationalism, its lies, its dressing up, its ludicrousness and its horror. The play is lively, angry and filled with beautiful moments and execratory language. There is fire, wit and passion here.
There are lessons about liars.
It's the story of two Irish men desperately trying not to be Irishmen, and the strangeness that comes with aping the English: the nasal bray, the tweedy clamminess, the permanent damp Sunday afternoon-ness of it all. The two men: Brendan Bracken and William Joyce, are, in a peculiar quirk of fate, pitted directly against each other in an information war: one as the British minister for information, the other as the infamous Lord Haw Haw. Its an extraordinary play: witty, fiery, angry - about twenty minutes too long - and horribly apt for these "interesting" times. It's also oddly nostalgic in a way that playwright, Thomas Kilroy, could not have foreseen when he wrote it in the 80's: we live in a world where the President of the United States tweets artless and poorly spelled bullshit all through the night. At least Bracken and Joyce were professionals!
When Brendan Bracken was Minister of Information a journalist told him, "Everything about you is phoney. Even your hair, which looks like a wig, isn't".
Brendan Bracken was his own work of fiction. He lived by the Epicurean dictum "Hide your life".
The son of a Tipperary stone-mason (and founder of the G.A.A.) he was a truant and trouble-maker who was shipped off to Australia to live with an uncle who was a priest. Upon his return he distanced himself from Ireland, shave four years off his age and presented himself at Sedbergh Public School in the West Riding of Yorkshire, pretending to be an Australian orphan with a family connection to the headmaster of Winchester College. He supported his career on a foundation of bullshit, by thinking fast and doing his research and staying one step ahead of everybody else. In the age of Fake News its a pleasure to witness someone lying so artfully and so well. Bracken was the liar's liar - his lies were as good as the truth.
We see him (played with tendon popping energy by Ian Toner) sat at his desk, alternating his phones and lying like someone had turned on a tap: gloriously, unselfconsciously, beautifully. It is lying as art. It is conversation as fencing. There is a French film - "Ridicule" - about the court of Versailles where social status could rise and fall based on your ability to mete out insults. One suspects Bracken would have fared well. He'd have been okay in a rap battle too.
His is the first half of the show and what a strange, plasticky thing it is: everything in Bracken's world is a fraud, except for the suave and avuncular Lord Beaverbrook (Sean Kearns, Canada dry) who is the only true bridge between the two men as he visits both. Bracken's environment is heightened, hysterical, his accent slipping, his logghorea unrelenting; he is his words and he invents the world with his words. His universe takes on the trappings of theatre: there is a Greek chorus, there is a taunting nemesis glaring down at him from a screen, there are farcical interludes with a girlfriend named Popsie: she dresses like a boy-scout to fire his ardor. There is a silly old ass, Lord Castlerock - "I'm Irish actually" - "the only problem with Hitler was he was frightfully common" - arsing around in a dressing gown and slippers. This is the Ministry of information by way of Greyfriars; the fight for the hearts and minds of the British people as orchestrated by one B. Wooster.
Toner is fantastic as Bracken: tense, wired, as tightly coiled as his hair and as smooth as an eel's belly. There is fire too. Bracken panics when Beaverbrook investigates his origins, he feels as if his tail is trapped in the door. He begs the publishing magnate to bury the file. It is one of the play's few wrong notes - Beaverbrook believes that the British public will love his rags to riches life story, Bracken wants to keep spinning the plates. He's right - the public might like the story, but the Establishment, his peers, would never forgive him.
By the end the lies have caught up with him. He is obsessed with his nemesis: the suave, unflappable Haw Haw, with his insinuations and his Teutonic dueling scar, and his monochrome grandeur, as monumental as the sculptures Bracken's father used to build, and as redolent as death. As the tension becomes too much he begins to unravel, in a performance of extraordinary physicality. Toner is remarkable.
The second half is very different in tone. William Joyce may be American by birth, Irish by default, English by design and German by political expediency, but he knows who he is. The play finds Joyce and his wife Margaret (Charlotte McCurry) living as German citizens in the dying days of the war, she teaching a romantic Anglophile buffoon called Erik (Kearns again, showing a shapely ankle in his plus fours) how to be an English gentlemen and Joyce still employed undermining and subverting the British people through his regular broadcasts. He is another man possessed by glossolalia, language pouring out of him unceasingly as through from a sluice. When he discovers a pragmatic affair between Margaret and Erik he talks unceasingly for twenty four hours. This is language as a blunt instrument, language as torture. He too is tormented by his opposite number. As he languishes in his cell Bracken appears like a phantom before him, taunting and pleading.
This is a fantastic piece of work and the cast are supremely confident, note perfect for press night. The play throws everything at them as they leap from monologue, to dialogue, to interacting with telephones, talking walls and a surprising amount of luggage. Nothing phases them: Toner is two different men in his dual role, physically changed: clammy and pleading as Bracken, hollow eyed and haunted as Joyce. It's a long play - too long - but his commitment never wavers. McCurry is wonderful as Joyce's Utopian fascist wife Margaret: plummy, clear-eyed, rampantly xenophobic, and bound to this increasingly frazzled man she has the misfortune to love. She conveys this magnificently. Sean Kearns, whether he's the internationally smooth Beaverbrook, a Blandings style silly bugger or an Ealing comedy every-man, lifts every scene. It takes real power to turn Erik, in his plus fours, and making sincere courtly love to Margaret, to Erik the trembling bellowing Nazi. They are both fools and both doomed, but Nazi Erik is a terrifying presence, the sneering, superior Joyce finally intimidated.
Ciaran Bagnall's set is, as we've come to expect, brilliantly conceived: elegant and functional, unveiling more and more surprises as the play continues, unfolding like the protagonists. Jimmy Fay's direction is utterly fastidious and the play horribly timely - in a week where the fucking BBC discuss Tommy Robinson at length under a picture of the little thug with a gag over his mouth - the irony apparently lost - we need plays like Thomas Kilroy's "rage against the whole nature of fascism"; its dissection of nationalism, its lies, its dressing up, its ludicrousness and its horror. The play is lively, angry and filled with beautiful moments and execratory language. There is fire, wit and passion here.
There are lessons about liars.
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