Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me – Southwark Playhouse, London *****

[written for The public Reviews]

As tube trains rumble overhead it’s not too difficult to imagine the war-torn city of Beirut above the dark vaults of the Southwark Playhouse which is a powerful thought in the context of Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, a play about the potency of the imagination in the face of despair. As an Englishman, Michael, says when he joins an American and Irishman in a cell in the middle of the Lebanon hostage crisis, people outside don’t like to think about their imprisonment, implying that if the outsiders don’t think about it they don’t have to imagine what it’s like. This play forces us to contemplate incarceration and this makes for an intense and sometimes uncomfortable play, the misery of which is leavened by some very fine comedy.

Three men are chained to the wall and forced to tolerate each other’s company which, despite all the arguments, is the only thing which makes the situation bearable. We only hear reports of Adam, the American, having been alone for two months before the arrival of the Irishman, Edward, and we get the impression that continued solitude would have driven him insane. When Michael arrives, the comic potential of the ‘Englishman, Irishman…’ scenario is not passed up. There are some great nationalistic gags and the Englishman’s outraged reaction to being personally blamed by the Irishman for the potato famine of ‘150 years ago’ is particularly good. The insults continue to fly when Michael, a priggish university don, says that the ‘dialect’ of the Irish would be beautiful ‘if not for their coarseness which is so self-defeating’.

There is great comedy here (watch out for the hitch-hiker and his backpack joke) but we are firmly in the realm of tragedy. There are echoes of Hamlet’s ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space’. Hamlet calls Denmark a prison even though he is empirically free; the hostages are imprisoned but can escape their confines through dreams and imagination. Despite agreeing that an actor’s life must be dull, all three men act out their escape, whether through an elaborate fantasy involving Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or by imagining they are drinking together in a pub or celebrating Christmas. With not even a window to show them whether it is night or day, the men perform their attachment to the outside world by verbally composing letters home and imagining they are shooting films on the streets of Beirut.

Hamlet calls Denmark a prison which Horatio and Rosencrantz dispute, but no one can deny the reality of the hostage cell in Lebanon even though Edward can joke that it isn’t as bad as Strabane. The men cling to optimism and hope, trying to follow Hamlet’s philosophy that ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’. Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me takes us on a journey through three men’s tortured and conflicted minds and forces us to contemplate the human condition in extremis. The play isn’t always easy to watch but it feels vital and important. The script is excellent, sharp and witty with only a few minor stumblings into earnestness; it feels obvious and unsubtle for Adam to pronounce that their captors don’t need to tear them apart because they are already doing it to each other. This twentieth anniversary production showcases exactly why this play received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1993 and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play. These men have personal failings in abundance but their strength and resilience is an exaltation of the human spirit.

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