‘I am not your punch bag! I am a Member of Parliament!’
An MP with an instinct for compassion. An ex-serviceman with a life in free fall. And a parliamentary protection officer who’s having none of it.
This volatile new play stars BAFTA Award winner Anna Maxwell Martin (Motherland, Line of Duty) as a hard-working opposition backbencher whose ideals of public office are tested by the demands of a man in crisis, played by Tony, BAFTA and Emmy Award winner James Corden (One Man, Two Guvnors, The History Boys).
Directed by Olivier and Tony Award winner Matthew Warchus (A Christmas Carol, Matilda The Musical) and written by Olivier Award winner Joe Penhall (Blue/Orange, Mood Music), The Constituent deconstructs politics, panic alarms and the conflict between public service and personal safety.
__Assisted Performances:__
BSL, 23 Jul, 7:30pm
Captioned, 26 Jul, 7:30pm
Relaxed, (Audio Described, BSL & Captioned) 27 Jul, 2:30pm
Audio Described, Wed 31 Jul, 7:30pm
Matthew Warchus’ direction feels melodramatic, plunging into darkness at scene changes in a way that kills the drama. In these moments, he has characters spitting lines at one another as if they’re on EastEnders. The police get a good old wringing, but Zachary Hart’s bent cop Mellor is an infuriatingly cartoonish villain, his lines feeling cringe-inducingly on-the-nose. He’s even less believable than Monica’s relationship with Alec.
But that’s the thing: there are lots of glimpses of a great play, lots of important themes and lots of great lines. The men who’ve made threats against Monica are being investigated, the police officer assures her, because it’s classed as hate speech. “They can protect me from being hated?” she scoffs. It just never quite gets away from feeling like Penhall went “I want to write a play about violence against MPs” and called some of the arguments “Monica” and some of them “Alec”, and forced a few plot points around them. You want it to settle, to dig more deeply, rather than throw the net more widely. You want the dialogue to flow like these are real people, not ciphers being swallowed up by structure.
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