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Scandalous affairs and public disgrace
LIFE AFTER SCANDAL
HAMPSEAD THEATRE
THE knives seem to be truly out for the press in theatreland at the moment, with two official openings this week for productions based on true stories about the intrusive, unflinching savagery of the media.
But unlike the grotesque emotional steamroller of Parade at the Donmar, Robin Soans’s Life After Scandal treads a subtler, quietly affecting path through the miasma of accusations, betrayals and painful truths, as suffered by some of our nation’s greatest pariahs.
Gathering together a series of interviews with high-profile disgrace cases – Lord Charles Brocket, Major Charles Ingram, Duncan Roy and Jonathan Aitken to name but a few – Soans weaves a compelling nexus of verbatim reminiscences and observations that darts from Essex girl vox pops to the austere suffering of Margaret Cook with disarming synthesis.
Whether these fallen idols are innocent of their charges is not of interest to the playwright. Soans eschews judgement in favour of horse’s mouth commentary and a fragile, composite view on the nature of scandal – the sheer bloody madness of it (Aitken claims one major British tabloid offered some of his fellow prisoners £40,000 to spike him with Rohypnol and take pictures of him in bed with another man so they could run the headline “Aitken Turns Gay in Prison”), its brutal power, and its redemptive qualities (the former Conservative MP is now a reborn Christian).
The ubiquitous Hamiltons (plum roles played with relish by Caroline Quentin and Michael Mears) are perhaps the surest recipients of the windfalls possible from scandal. They masticate regally over cream tea, explaining how they have converted their misfortune into money through ruthless self-promotion.
Not all of Soans’s candidates have been so lucky. We (the audience is frequently given the role of interviewer) visit Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? cheat Major Charles Ingram at home, disconsolate in shabby, elasticated sportswear, plagued by mass outbursts of coughing wherever he goes, hawking copies of his autobiography as a condition for interview.
The vitriol simmers down into more philosophical outpourings in the second half – Soans takes care not to make the media a simple patsy, extending the blame to the whole “establishment”,
a gormless celebrity obsessed public (Big Brother’s Chantelle got twice as many votes as Tony Blair did at the last election), and the fallibility of man.
By this last, each character was undone and by it each, here, is made human once more. Even the oily Aitken (an excellent Philip Bretherton) becomes oafishly likeable (his story about a man paid to break into his prison by the Daily Mirror would make even David Leigh, his bête noire at The Guardian, smile).
But it is the story of Lord Montagu (Tim Preece), dragged through the papers more than 50 years ago for “gross offences” with an RAF serviceman, that proves the saddest tale and, at the same time, the most promising example that a change in public attitudes is not only necessary but possible.
Until October 20
020 7722 9301
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