Written for Culture Wars
A man walks into a kitchen, announcing himself to a woman preparing food: “Honey, I’m home.” She turns to greet him and freezes, almost collapsing into the sideboard. Her knees half give way, they cock inwards. It takes her a moment to recover before she takes the blue papers he holds out and they continue this mundane conversation, reading lines about work and dinner from a script. They remain physically awkward, but speak like life-partners. What they say doesn’t correspond to reality: he talks about their salmon supper as she produces a chicken from the oven. He doesn’t seem to know his way around what seems to be his own kitchen. She doesn’t seem to like or trust him at all, though her words are tender and comfortable. Everything they do is stilted and forced; they clunk.
So begins Edgar & Annabel. It makes next to no sense, yet it’s oddly captivating. It feels like a puzzle with answers. The scripts and the awkwardness, the consciousness with which the actors perform means that you’re not even entirely sure how to watch. What’s fiction, what’s staging? It is a hugely courageous start from Sam Holcroft, refusing us a foothold to from which to start. Even more bravely, she doesn’t give us any answers whatsoever until the second scene.
It turns out that Edgar and Annabel are, currently, Nick and Marianne (Trystan Gravelle and Kirsty Bushell), two members of a resistance movement against an Orwellian regime. With each house bugged by a computer capable of analysing sounds and speech-patterns, they must play Edgar and Annabel, sticking to the script to ensure continuity and imperceptibility. They do so while plotting revolution, leading to a brilliant sequence in which they prepare a bomb, drowning out the noise with a raucous Singstar competition. Insurgency to an off-key power ballad soundtrack.
Edgar and Annabel is the most original piece of new writing I’ve seen in ages. Though one has to buy into the world – Why aren’t the government using CCTV? Wouldn’t Nick’s voice register differently to his Edgar predecessor? – Holcroft delivers a gripping and volatile plot that keeps you guessing. Moreover, she does so with real panache, exploring every nook and cranny of the situation for comic potential and dramatic tension.
Much of this is down to the layers of performance that rub against each other. Edgar and Annabel is, at one level, about acting. Nick and Marianne fall off script and trip one another up. They fall in love as their characters grow apart and argue. Props go missing and solutions are improvised – none better than Gravelle’s brilliant vocal impression of uncorking a wine bottle. Holcroft’s masterstroke is to embed high stakes into the most banal conversations: sticking to the script, to everyday inanity, is a matter of life and death.
The dislocation of text and action is both hilarious and pointed. This is subtext to the nth degree. Meaning is not hidden within language, it must be covertly – often clumsily and confusingly – inserted.
At base, Holcroft is interested in commitment to a cause. Subsumed by the characters they have to play, Nick and Marianne give up their entire lives. The constant question is, “What price ideology?” The individual’s sacrifice here is exploited by the larger political force and those on the front line, living their lives tiptoeing on the precipice, are shown to be mere pawns, expendable and unvalued.
Much like the rest of us, in fact, manipulated by the system imposed on us by the establishment. The genius – and I don’t use the word lightly – of Holcroft’s script is that it works both ways. Not only are Edgar and Annabel constructed roles, they also stand for each of us. The banality of their script is the very same as that of our lives: work and dinner and idle, empty conversations. In this, Holcroft implies that the system, the unchallenged order of things, even the state as a whole, is performed into existence. Our conformity is coerced, since to act as we would like would be to stick our heads above the parapet; to interrupt the mechanism that, while not ideal, nonetheless functions smoothly. Pretend for long enough, however, and the pretence becomes real. But step out of that act, even for a second, and you puncture it irrevocably.
Lyndsey Turner’s production is admirably clear, performed with both lightness and vim by Gravelle and Bushell, who distinguish between different modes without reverting to signposting. While it is constrained by its length – with so much to set up, it has a tendency to skim and could use, and pull off, the thoroughness of a two-act structure – Edgar and Annabel is an ambitious, dexterous and fiercely intelligent piece of political theatre, all the better for keeping its radicalism tucked up its sleeve.
Photograph: tbc
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