Review Roundup: THE CONSTITUENT, Starring James Corden

The Old Vic just celebrated opening night of The Constituent, a new play by Joe Penhall, directed by Matthew Warchus, starring James Corden, Anna Maxwell Martin and Zachary Hart. The Constituent deconstructs politics, panic alarms and the conflict between public service and personal safety. 

This volatile new play stars  BAFTA Award winner Anna Maxwell Martin 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. 

Let's see what the critics are saying about the new play!

Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan

Aliya Al-Hassan, BroadwayWorld: As a two-hander, this production is at its most powerful. The addition of parliamentary protection officer Mellor adds little more than David Brent-style commentary to the situation. Zachary Hart commits to the role, but is left with the rather one-dimensional attitude that the only future is one where MPs wear stab vests.

Clive Davis, The Times: The timing couldn’t have been better. Joe Penhall’s new play arrives just at the moment when the relationship between members of parliament and the people they represent is uppermost in our minds. And the fact that James Corden is making his long overdue return to the London stage, playing a troubled army veteran alongside Line of Duty’s Anna Maxwell Martin as a hard-working backbencher, will surely help at the box office as well. That said, this turns out to be a surprisingly tepid study of a vulnerable man whose life has lost its moorings. Penhall, who has explored mental frailties before in the more accomplished Blue/Orange, a chamber piece set in a psychiatric clinic, is said to have interviewed a number of MPs including

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph: In a bold (some might say credulity-testing) move, Corden, 45, plays Alec an ex-serviceman who experienced traumatic tours of duty in Afghanistan. First seen installing security equipment in the constituency office of a Leftish opposition MP called Monica (Anna Maxwell Martin), he’s initially an innocuous gobby geezer (Corden on terra cognita). It turns out the pair went to the same school and grew up on the same street. “I’m always here if you need me,” she kindly offers, when it emerges he’s having domestic battles; Alec is distressed by his current divorce and separation from his children. That’s the basic compact of a good MP, isn’t it? But it becomes apparent that Monica may be intensifying his frustrations. Alec’s faith in his assumed ally to address his grievances (and even advance ideas about legislation to redress systemic bias, as he sees it, against men) is bound to meet a reality-check.

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: The outbursts of violence are few but they startle when they come; so are the sudden bursts of tears, which are moving. In the end, it is not the play you imagine it to be, with no binary equation of victim/villain. Each of these characters is a victim of the system, hanging on, just – even Hart’s comical protection officer, whose outburst about his ground-down rights contains a sting.

Andrzej Lukowski, TimeOut: Where ‘The Constituent’ unfortunately goes off the rails is in the introduction of a third character. At first Zachary Hart’s paranoid Brummie police officer Mellor seems like a reasonable addition to the story: Monica is getting increasingly worried about Alec’s obsessive behaviour, but doesn’t qualify for proper ministerial protection. But eventually Mellor’s ludicrous behaviour blows up the whole play and unbalances the carefully wrought clash between Monica and Alec. Even when Mellor is out of the equation, Matthew Warchus’s hitherto finely-balanced production feels trivialised and diminished. Penhall perhaps makes a couple of valid points about the British police. But really it feels like he wasn’t sure where to take the story so decided to throw in Mellor as a very crude curveball.

Sam Marlowe, The Stage: Matthew Warchus’ crisp production features a couple of heavyweight stars returning to the stage – Anna Maxwell Martin and James Corden – and Penhall’s dialogue is packed with zap and zing. But the play is at once too narrow and too broad: it tackles overarching themes of the right’s bogeys ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’, as well as political alienation, the crisis in mental-health care and divisions of wealth, class and gender. Yet it’s a little airless, the issues funnelled through over-convenient individual circumstances in neat sound bites and discussed in a static setting that quickly begins to feel a touch contrived. Still, there’s plenty to chew on here, and the performances are pretty much faultless.

Natasha Tripney, The Standard: Corden does a strong job, capturing the character’s intensity and increasing desperation. He makes the most of the material. As does the always reliable Martin, who convinces in the role of a politician trying to retain her capacity for empathy while being councilled to keep people at arm's length for the sake of her safety. Her concern for the impact all this is having on her children is palpable.

Adam Bloodworth, City A.M.: 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.

Fiona Mountford, iNews: Penhall and director Matthew Warchus present a highly slick, possibly too highly slick, 90 minutes, in a traverse playing space created by the addition of an imposing block of onstage seating. The script begs for the addition of a little judicious depth and breadth, to flesh out crucial backstories more convincingly.

Neil Norman, Express: Corden is outstanding, however, and the manic energy that turbo charged the comedy of One Man is here repurposed in a more dramatic context. You can feel his anger simmering even in some of the more comic interchanges, and Maxwell Martin responds with the cool wariness of someone who wants to do the right thing for a man who behaves like a human IED.

Alun Hood, WhatsOnStage: As a star vehicle for Corden and Maxwell Martin, The Constituent works well enough. There’s some cracking dialogue and the balance between comic and bleak is exquisitely handled, but it smacks of a very fine writer wanting to dash off something relevant and timely, without really offering anything genuinely illuminating or new. The abrupt ending is unsatisfying but, to be fair, that may be Penhall’s point: that for people in Alec’s precarious position, there is no satisfying ending.

Sarah Hemming, Financial Times: This is a play about what it means to serve. The three characters are all public servants. All three have faced tough problems and ethical dilemmas. Alec is struggling with the aftermath of witnessing unspeakable violence, Monica with the wrath of an angry electorate who feel let down. In a year when, amid division and rancour, many go to the polls, Penhall’s play makes the case for more care and empathy. He reminds us of the other meaning of constituent — “to be part of a whole”.

Marianka Swain, London Theatre: Matthew Warchus’s combative traverse staging, with a bank of the audience seated onstage, works a treat, creating a claustrophobic intensity and forcing us to look at ourselves – we are responsible here too. The scene changes could be much shorter though, especially in such a taut 90-minute piece. In a cynical world, Penhall’s play is notable for its empathy – a quality that Monica strives for, and which is baked into the show at a fundamental level. Fixing our system so that it supports everyone, including genuinely good MPs? That gets my vote.

Tim Bano, The Independent: 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.