Written for Culture Wars
The best play of the year to date, The Witness is a beautifully woven, layered piece of writing with a rare blend of individual and global ethics. In only her second play, Vivienne Franzmann has produced a bona fide contemporary classic.
The first thing you see, on walking into Lizzie Clachan’s domestic set, is a poster for the V&A’s recent Postmodernism exhibition. It sticks out, jarring with the room’s décor and preventing passage to the play’s world like a glitch in the Matrix. However, it serves to say this: watch accordingly.
Sure enough, the bookshelves provide all the clues you need to The Witness’s DNA. The living room is lined with travelogues, art books, war histories and dictionaries. The walls, lined with hanging artefacts and framed tapestries, are those of a cross-cultural magpie.
Joseph is an acclaimed photojournalist, now retired save for the odd wedding. Boxed up in his cellar, organised by crisis, are pictures and negatives of human horrors: Uganda, Cambodia, Vietnam, Israel. One shot has had a particular impact on his life: a young girl in Rwanda reaching out for her dead mother’s hand. That young girl is Alex, Joseph’s adopted daughter. Hearing gunfire, he scooped her up and ran.
On a purely narrative level, Franzmann hits you with revelation after revelation, without ever tilting into schlock. Every other scene springs a major surprise. At least two of them are genuine rug-pulls. (Spoiler warning from here on.)
At its core, then, is a dilemma pure, simple and unsolvable: was Joseph right to intervene in Alex’s – then Frances Mutesi, by the way – life? If that situation looked hopeless, Franzmann then sets about mitigating the circumstances and, essentially, The Witness becomes the dramatic equivalent of an ethical conundrum turned this way and that, inside and out. What if you add a brother, cropped out of the picture as it was published? Joseph claims he could only carry one of them and had to leave the other child for dead. What if that brother was not, as Joseph had claimed, almost certainly killed by returning militia? What if the scene wasn’t simply as Joseph had found it? That Franzmann is able to incorporate all these altered scenarios into a single narrative, allowing each to exist fully before zooming out a little further, goes beyond impressive. It’s ingenious.
Moreover, Franzmann is able to raise a raft of similarly enormous questions in less than two hours of stage time.
Thematically, The Witness is as dense a piece of playwrighting as you’ll find. It’s a masterclass in postmodern playwrighting. Her content is meticulously assembled, doubling up on itself without resorting to such lazy connective tissue as simple repetition or strained vocabulary. Franzmann also writes performatively, yet embeds media snippets – songs or news reports – into the play seamlessly. Kayne West’s Gold Digger rings out from Joseph’s stereo – “You give me money / When I’m in need” – and instantly seeds the notion of both charity and its exploitation, as you suspect of Simon – a Pinteresque mystery-man who purports to be Alex’s brother.
To go back to those books, they’re all represented and fully-fledged. She echoes our relationship with the developing world in Joseph and Alex’s parent-child relationship, which adds another dimension to the onstage characterisation of the baby-boom generation. Joseph, kicking back on the trappings of his success, orders his daughter what’s best for her, demanding that she go back to Cambridge, put some clothes on, turn that crap off and so on. Alex, meanwhile, constantly needs confirmation: “I know it sounds stupid,” she repeats. She echoes the impossibility of cross-cultural communication – Alex tries to explain the Teletubbies to her brother – such that the lived experience seems unbridgeable. As Alex lounges in front of Loose Women, you’re always aware of the alternative avoided. Franzmann’s also careful to use context. Joseph has taken to ordering rare cheeses on the internet. You can get anything online, just want and click. His next-door neighbour Jackie has taken up urban farming, ordering fertilized duck eggs. (This affords Franzmann a corking, if perhaps a little strained, metaphor of returning one of her chickens for it to get mauled by a dog.)
There are echoes too, of The Author’s aesthetic concerns about disturbing material in the notion of Joseph’s forthcoming retrospective at the Imperial War Museum and questions about whether representation can equal reality. Alex’s brother Simon, when he arrives in London, is desperate to have his photograph taken with David Beckham. That he means his Madame Tussauds waxwork is by the by. Asked whether he’s seen an elephant, Simon replies yes, adding: “On television.” What then of Joseph’s photographs? In what way are they equivalent? It’s a question that, like so much of The Witness, bugs and needles. But there are many more: Why does some art and culture shy away from the world’s issues? How does photojournalism function as art? What level of manipulation might be permissible? How many times do we need telling something before it takes effect – and how long should we repeat ourselves?
But it’s biggest idea, the one it chews over and over, is the concept of what it means to witness. For years Joseph has packaged his experiences and survived, yet in unpacking them for the forthcoming retrospective, he unravels, careering into a spiral of drink, sex and chicken theft. His constant dark irony, prodding at cultural taboos, is parched of empathy as the effect of his witnessing. Joseph has, at some level, profited from the pain of others and, in his middle-class Hampstead home, the question finally framed is whether he “took photos” or “bore witness.”
Franzmann’s primary point, however, is that it is the witness that holds the power, that controls the story in its telling. In the end – massive spoiler alert – it is because Simon saw him manipulating the tragic scene, separating mother and child to get the most powerful image, that Joseph leaves him for dead. He attempts to rid himself of witnesses and make himself unaccountable in holding others accountable.
However, the reason that The Witness works so well as drama is not merely because it is so heavily loaded with symbolism and questions. It is because it thrives on the impossibility of doing all good things. None of the characters, even Joseph in his ultimate crime of manipulation, is acting out of pure malevolence. There are no villains here, only three people trying to navigate the world as best they can. Franzmann plays brilliantly with the impossibility of doing all good things or of all-seeing witnesses (Joseph admits that Mad Men and The Wire have passed him by at the last moment) and with the non-existence of the straightforward, black-white ethical dilemma.
It ends up beautifully in production. Lizzie Clachan’s design, which makes voyeurs of us all by placing us in the walls of a full-scale living room, almost in jury boxes or spectator banks, plays perfectly. The blocking – quite possibly also Clachan’s in its conceptual clarity – repeats and twists itself according to the power dynamics of whose on top at any given moment. Simon Godwin handles the play exquisitely, allowing the intricacies of Franzmann’s texts to land and bounce off one another without stressing them. And he draws superb performances from Danny Webb (apparently incapable of anything less), Pippa Bennett-Warner and David Ajala. Phenomenal.
Photograph: Robert Workman
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