Review: A SUBJECT OF SCANDAL AND CONCERN, Finborough Theatre, May 23 2016

If theatre is, as once described, writing in the air, what then of the early days of television drama, the tapes of which were often wiped and re-used?

In 1960, John Osborne, in his peak Angry Young Man iconoclastic phase, wrote A Subject of Scandal and Concern (continuing at the Finborough Theatre until 7 June) for the BBC and cast Richard Burton and Rachel Roberts as his leads (with Nigel Davenport in an early role). It was broadcast and staged a few years later in Nottingham and then... gone.

But this intense, dare one say, angry revival by Proud Haddock brings the play back, giving it a London stage for the first time. And that decision is completely justified by an eerie, discomfiting, but ultimately fulfilling 70 minutes in the tight environment of a black box space.

George Holyoake is an unemployed teacher who spends most of his time delivering socialist lectures, a dangerous pastime in the 1840s. In staid Cheltenham, taking the last question in the Mechanics Hall after a radical speech, he makes what sounds (to our ears) a fairly innocuous point about the money spent on the established church in a time of great poverty. Soon, after his remarks were reported by a rabidly authoritarian newspaper, he finds himself at the Assizes, becoming the last man to stand trial for blasphemy in England. For speaking his true opinion, provincial zealots, cloaking themselves in a very rough approximation of the Common Law, exact revenge by ruining his life.

James Muscato gives us a Holyoake who burns with indignation at his fate, stumbles over his words, but never his thoughts and cruelly neglects his family, sacrificing them an the altar of his convictions. He is a man out of time and out of place. He gets good support from an ensemble cast, whose members play multiple roles, the standout of whom is Ralph Birtwell as an exasperated judge.

Though the language is that of Dickens at his most florid (deliberately so in a preposterous indictment given patter treatment by the impressively egregious Edmund Digby-Jones) the ideas are very much those of the 1960s - an establishment lined up to frustrate personal liberty needs not accommodation, but challenge, no matter the price. There's plenty of the late Christopher Hitchens fate too in the weaselly arguments put to Holyoake about recanting on his deathbed.

But perhaps the most resonant aspect of the play in 2016, is its relevance in many parts of the world in which "to blaspheme" brings the danger of death, beatings or imprisonment, judicial or extra-judicial, to men and women whose crime is indeed merely to proclaim what they believe. One could argue that 50 years on, the play's message is needed more now than on its first broadcast - alas.

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