Jason Watkins and Tom Hollander in
Landscape with Weapon
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The British love their debates, as any casual observer of the goings-on in parliament can attest, not least when it comes to the theatre—which doesn't necessarily mean that a play fuelled by argument is itself dramatic. Joe Penhall bumped up against this truism in his (in my minority view over-praised) play Blue/Orange ,and there's a similarly hectoring feel to much of his latest work, Landscape with Weapon , notwithstanding the Martin Crimp-like title and at least three first-rate performances from its cast of four. The director, Roger Michell, and his designers (William Dudley and Rick Fisher) are all alumni of Blue/Orange, which began in this same space, the National's Cottesloe, before transferring to the West End and then (in a separate production) off-Broadway. But as happened with Blue/Orange, it seems likely that non-Brits may be more naturally resistant to a scenario that sacrifices plausible characterisation on the altar of thesis-mongering. That's a particular shame given a narrative that builds to a moving, genuinely disturbing finish that is nearly Kafkaesque (or is that Orwellian?) in its portrait of an individual crushed by the state, even if way too much of the first act, especially, seems to aspire to a Heartbreak House for our troubled, warmongering times.
One can only imagine what George Bernard Shaw would make of today's military machine: an impersonal, immovable entity here chillingly embodied by Pippa Haywood and the brilliant Jason Watkins as two apparatchiks in thrall to varying degrees to the Ministry of Defence. The object of their concern is Tom Hollander's panicked Ned, a weapons industry engineer on the outs with his wife and mother but deeply embroiled in a moral tête-à-tête with his brother, a dentist called Dan (Julian Rhind-Tutt). Their encounters constitute an escalating argument over the ethical efficacy of the self-navigating airborne "drones"—"a symphony in the sky" in Ned's not altogether likely phrase—whose capacity for destruction matters less, in Ned's view, than the beauty of the thing itself. Ned invokes no less a figure than Leonardo da Vinci to advance the purely joyous cause of the scientific pioneer, even if (as the play goes to some pains to point out) da Vinci's more morally dubious inventions went unrealised whereas Ned's elicit an eerie gleam in his superiors' eyes. Surveillance, shall we say, was never like this.
Julian Rhind-Tutt in
Landscape with Weapon
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There probably hasn't been an English dramatist since Peter Shaffer who is as drawn to confrontations between two men as is Penhall, even if, in the younger writer's case, the conflicted coupling more often than not involves warring, fiercely loving brothers. The dynamic between Ned and Dan leads in the first act to a messy set-to atop a table in Ned's new, elaborately corniced Earl's Court flat in which the pair have at each other—the contents of a takeaway curry falling messily where they will. Both actors navigate exceptionally well the equivocation of dialogue that is at its most natural between the siblings—the rhythm of "yea"s and "no"s familiar to all of us who have been caught off guard having to uphold (or refute) opinions about which we may not be all that clear ourselves. To that end, I'm not sure the play really needs the side issue about Dan's profiteering foray into the world of Botox—a plot strand that seems too conveniently, well, engineered to give Ned some opposition in a scenario that is compelling enough as it is. On the other hand, Dan's dental manoeuvres are nothing compared to the probing entered into by MOD rep Haywood and intelligence expert Watkins, both of whom know how to take a man when he's faltering and lead him toward a fall: the final scene delivers a Ned at disturbing odds with the alternately eloquent, defensive, and cajoling figure encountered at the start. There's even the suggestion, however short-lived, that events have robbed Ned of humankind's greatest asset: language.
[AD]No one can accuse Penhall of shying away from words, and Landscape With Weapon lets fly on all sorts of topics, from Israel as America's poodle (I thought that distinction belonged to Britain), the American penchant for the name Peregrine (never in my experience), and Haywood's assertion that the real bugbear in contemporary America isn't Islam but art. (That one got a huge response from the audience.) Leaning into her every line, Haywood can't do much to lift a purely tendentious role, however given over the character is to small talk about traffic on the M25 and to a grin that, we soon discover, couches a zealotry that can crush those in its grip. The male cast members are all wonderful, starting with Green Wing regular Rhind-Tutt, who makes a pretty phoney eleventh-hour whinge about his life immediately real and true. (His comic timing, abetted by a natural geniality, is the stuff of genius.) Those who know Watkins' inimitable skills as a farceur will be doubly gripped by the furious conviction he brings to the role of someone for whom democracy, he tells us, is "overrated," especially in those poorer countries that don't know what to do with it. And once he moves beyond the whiny nasality that somewhat besets him in the first act, Hollander electrically embodies an enquiring mind up against a system that knows a thing or two about bringing brilliance to its knees: an arid play of ideas turned, by its close, into something gaspingly immediate.
Landscape with Weapon
By Joe Penhall
Directed by Roger Michell
National Theatre/Cottesloe