I'd reviewed Nina Raine's Tribes in Singapore when Pangdemonium staged it; it glimmered with the warmth of empathy, where a family reconnects with their son and brother after years of indifference to his disability. Her new play Consent has none of that. It's brutal. Empathy is just another weapon in a war of attrition. Consent is about rape and sexual consent and the indifference of the law, but it's also a portrait of the wounds that marriage leaves when yes and no get muddled. This review of Consent was first published by Exeunt Magazine.

I like to think you never really learn how to fight with someone until you’ve been married to them. I speak from experience. These are the fights you can only have when you know exactly which layer of scar tissue to dig a switchblade into so that it will bleed out slowly and painfully, and that will take you days – no, weeks – to stanch the wound with forgiveness and apologies. Maybe it’s the legality of the marriage contract that does it, the signing of which is at once a surrender and a liberation. And both legality and marriage take the floor in Nina Raine’s exquisitely devastating new play, Consent.

Consent circles closely around rape, and sexual consent is the play’s main artery. Three middle-aged couples, mostly close friends and mostly in the legal profession, are navigating the affairs of the heart over copious amounts of alcohol in their cozy living rooms – as well as a court case at work. Two of the male barristers are on opposing sides of a rape trial: the by-the-book, conscientious Tim (Pip Carter) as prosecutor for the crown, and the cerebral, self-righteous Ed (Ben Chaplin) defending the alleged rapist. Ed and his wife, Kitty (Anna Maxwell Martin) have just had a baby, and are good friends with another high-powered barrister couple, Jake (Adam James) and Rachel (Priyanga Burford), whose marriage holds more than just a few secrets. Then there’s Kitty’s alluring best friend, the actress Zara (Daisy Haggard), who bemoans the lack of female roles written the way the Ancient Greeks’ were – fiery, fiendish goddesses storming across the stage.

Zara gets her wish. Raine brings her scalpel to the dissection of the human heart when it comes to love, marriage, relationships, fidelity and revenge, flaying every part of it with clinical precision. While examining why the violent, repulsive act of rape still evokes such polarising responses in society, be it victim-blaming, slut-shaming or “she said no, but she meant yes”, Raine maps the justifications and excuses that come with consent onto the unruly territory of marriage. Women aren’t only treated as physical possessions in the courtroom, where a rape survivor, Gayle (Heather Craney) realises she’s been stonewalled by the system, reduced to just another statistic. One weeping husband shouts at his wife: “He’s stolen you, the fucking thief” – and it’s clear she’s become a possession in marriage as well.

There’s a symmetry to Consent. The yes-no of it, the husband-wife, the thinking-feeling, the black-white, the right-wrong, the sorry-not sorry. The brutal arguments that run through the play, pitting one side against another, are then themselves inverted, where couples seem to fall into a mirror and come out the other side to find themselves horribly disoriented instead of reflected the way they think they will be. Director Roger Michell doesn’t just position his couples as contenders in a ring; he shifts the ring itself, flipping entrances and exits and positions of power, where every physical side taken on stage also means an alignment with one person or one belief against another. On Hildegard Bechtler’s clever, automated set, the detritus of crumbling marriages disappears and reappears, sliding soundlessly back onto the surface. The fights are long, draining and melodramatic, and their irrationality and relentlessness feels deliberate. Fights are never rational. They’re bloody and frustratingly repetitive, and make every victory feel like a pyrrhic one.

But Raine leavens her lacerating dialogue with generous lashings of humour. Consent may be exhausting, but it’s also darkly, overwhelmingly funny, even at its bleakest points. Her words find the perfect conduit through a stunning cast of seven who inhabit spiky characters hard to sum up with a collection of adjectives. But it is the on-stage coupling of Maxwell Martin as Kitty and Chaplin as Ed who are the most luminous of them all. She’s the proud empath to his detached logician. You feel entire conversations pass between them in the glances they exchange behind backs.

So much is stuffed into Consent. It’s also a tirade against the dispassionate gaze of the law and never lets you forget it; the barristers may well be wearing signs declaring ‘us lawyers are assholes’. But this also means that some of the stuffing shows at the seams. Raine wants us to mull over how rape culture is embedded in what is spoken and done and dismissed behind the closed doors of domestic life, but while Craney as rape survivor Gayle is absolutely gutting, her character sometimes feels like a convenient narrative device to bind this team of elite barristers to the muck of the real world. And while Consent wanders the infinite grey area between ‘yes’ and ‘no’, the symmetry that Raine and Michell revel in throughout the play, through wordplay and imagery, can feel just a tiny bit too on the nose.

But Fate adores its symmetry, its beginnings and endings. There’s a touch of the Greek with all of this: the hubris, the vengeance, the downfalls, the redemptions. What do we mean in a marriage when we say yes, and compromise, when we really want to say no, this is a dealbreaker? What do we mean when we say no to the person we both love and hate, when we are dying to say yes, I want you back, I want to work this out? It’s not just the big yes-no questions that get an airing, but the tiny ones as well: will you fold the laundry, will you have another glass of wine, will you tell me the truth about this text message? I’m not giving anything away by saying that Consent, in a way, ends as it begins, with a small gesture of an invitation. Say yes.

PRODUCTION INFORMATION
Writer: Nina Raine
Director: Roger Michell
Cast includes: Adam James, Anna Maxwell Martin, Ben Chaplin, Priyanga Burford, Pip Carter, Heather Craney and Daisy Haggard
Set Designer: Hildegard Bechtler
Lighting Designer: Rick Fisher
Music: Kate Whitley
Sound Designer: John Leonard
Running dates: 28 March - 17 May, 2017

I recently reviewed My Country; A Work in Progress at the National Theatre, which reminded me distinctly of Wild Rice's Cooling Off Day (2011), a piece of testimonial/verbatim theatre documenting the political resonances and the public's response to the watershed 2011 parliamentary elections in Singapore. I wrote about it in great detail here.

The following review of My Country was first published in Exeunt Magazine.

On June 24, 2016, as the results of the EU referendum began pouring in, my colleagues and I were watching our computer screens in a newsroom in Singapore with morbid fascination and sickening dread. The percentages sank – 51%, 50%, 49% – as did our stomachs. Our more utilitarian fellow citizens made a point of swarming currency exchange outlets in the central business district to change their strong Singapore dollars for the plummeting pound sterling; money changers shuttered and refused to sell any of their reserves.

The fallout that filtered through to our side of the world, a former British colony no less, left us baffled. Had the majority of UK residents understood what they were voting for? Did David Cameron just up and quit, humming a merry tune at his final press conference? Who was going to steer the UK out of this mess? And yet much of it also sounded familiar, overlapping with socio-political sentiments felt halfway around the world: the anti-immigration rhetoric, the promise of jobs and healthcare, the affluent island nation wary of its neighbours.

My Country; A Work in Progress is the National Theatre’s first attempt at dealing bluntly with the reverberations of Brexit and the country’s spectrum of responses to the referendum, and there’s a brevity to it that reflects, possibly, the haste with which this piece seems to have been put together. It’s an ambitious title – My Country – one that attempts to speak for all of the UK through its vox populi, and perhaps it isn’t surprising that the 75-minute result is a selection of highlights rather than a textured interrogation of the whole.

The hardworking cast of seven, suited and suitcased, embody and personify seven regions in the UK, playing up the accents, the archetypes, and the cultural quirks: Caledonia (Stuart McQuarrie), the North East (Laura Elphinstone), Northern Ireland (Cavan Clarke), Cymru (Christian Patterson), the East Midlands (Seema Bowri), the South West (Adam Ewan), and Westminster, the seat of power, Britannia herself (Penny Layden; she’s affectionately referred to by the other regions as Britney). Britannia has convened her various regions to observe the vote and to speak on behalf of their people against a backdrop of desks and ballot boxes. But by divvying up the country according to its geography and relying on the stereotypes that go with them, this theatrical United Kingdom predictably remains a Divided one.

A team of ten from the National Theatre gathered interviews with residents from across the country, aged 9 to 97, which were then knitted together by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and director Rufus Norris. Excerpts of these interviews are presented, by the personifications of these seven regions, as collections of pithy quotes: “If you’re going to export bombs, you’re going to import people,” declares a resident of Wales; Boris Johnson’s “the EU would be a lobster” speech gets a gleeful impersonation. The interviews have been judiciously edited to reflect a range of responses, with both Leave and Remain camps rubbing up against each other. The conversation moves through a selection of topics: childhood memory, nostalgia for a pastoral history, class privilege, welfare and benefits, geographical boundaries, those who are suspicious of immigrants and others who are more compassionate – the piece is at its best with these intimate verbatim interviews, with Duffy and Norris sustaining their blend of playfulness and pathos. The digestible soundbites are crowd-pleasing, accompanied with laughter and recognition, but they also make it hard to see My Country as more than a compilation of quotable quotes, the sentiments of which have already been paraded endlessly through the news.

My Country wants desperately to speak for the universal and the personal at the same time – the play’s subtitle, A Work in Progress, acknowledges the impossible goal it has set for itself. Halfway through the show, each of the seven regions wheels out a buffet of local foods. It’s an easy gimmick: a Talisker single malt from the Scots; Geordie pizza from the North East. It strikes me that My Country is an amuse bouche of a political documentary, one that summarises the UK’s complex diversity without getting its hands too dirty in the trenches that drive it apart.

My Country; A Work in Progress is on at the National Theatre until 22nd March 2017, followed by a national tour. Click here for more details.

DIRECTED BY Rufus Norris
WRITTEN BY Text from interviews with people across the UK and Carol Ann Duffy
CAST INCLUDES Seema Bowri, Cavan Clarke, Laura Elphinstone, Adam Ewan, Penny Layden, Stuart McQuarrie, Christian Patterson