Martin Wagner is a man who has clearly got a big bee in his bonnet about not being taken seriously by the literary establishment. His first play, The Agent, is a savage attack on the smart, commercially minded, shallow world of publishing, a world where (in his view) true art is stifled by the pressure to make money.
The play comprises one long confrontation between Alexander, the agent (shark-like William Beck), and Stephen (Stephen Kennedy, in an anorak), a hapless writer. Essentially, the play wills us to see how immoral and thoroughly nasty agents are, and how noble the underconfident (yet morally superior) writer is. We are told that it is based "on an original meeting".
It must have been one hell of a meeting. No sooner does Stephen arrive, with his cheap clothes and regional accent, than the chic, fashionable Alexander manages to condemn his first novel, glory in another author's huge success, dismiss his second work, and finally attempt to "let him go". It's the sort of nightmare encounter that anyone who has ever spent a lonely few months in front of a computer screen before nervously presenting a couple of chapters to an agent might panic about having. One could never imagine this happening to, say, J K Rowling or Helen Fielding, but it's probably customary for many, many others.
At one particularly cringeworthy moment, Stephen spots several copies of his first novel, Rachel's Machine, in Alexander's bookcase. "Take them," says Alexander cruelly. "Your books. Take them. They are probably more use to you than to us." Ooh, the cut-throat world of publishing. It's nasty, I can tell you. Stephen - who says he at first thought a publishing agent was a sort of literary Robin Hood, visiting the slush pile and rescuing gems from it - has to understand the grim truth. Agents are more like the Sheriff of Nottingham: dastardly and thoroughly self-serving.
All very well, but are we surprised? And anyway, is this discovery worth writing a play about? After all, agents have never pretended to be arbiters of taste, or flag-wavers for literary fiction. That's why there are so few of them on the Booker Prize judging panel, presumably. If an agent, in whatever medium, is successful, it's because he or she is good at spotting what the market wants, and can pull off spectacular deals for clients. We all know this. Even ten-year-old singers entering Britain's Got Talent know this. Wagner, however, thinks we don't, and presents us with a play that aspires to delve into power play but in reality does little more than portray a naive author who is in a state because he wants his agent to play publishing God.
Wagner's play, which is directed competently enough by Lesley Manning, suffers from another big problem. Writers tend to have unexciting lives. And there is a lot of waiting around in the publishing world. Even when Stephen pulls a desperate stunt on Alexander, and we are meant to see the power dramatically shifting, not a whole lot more happens on stage. There are many pauses in this production, and they are not Pinteresque.
Kennedy plays the hopeless writer with sad conviction, but his constant pacing started to get on my nerves somewhat. Beck, who is blessed with a fabulously mobile face, was much more gutsy, playing his role like someone acting another person in a manner befitting a character who is patently a two-faced little shit.
Yet although I suspect only people with a grudge against the publishing world will really appreciate this play, I sort of salute Martin Wagner for being pissed off and courageous enough to push it through, first on to the London fringe, and now into the West End. In the programme, he lists his previous achievements, one of which is a self-published novel, called, spookily enough, Rachel's Machine. At the time of writing this, its position on the Amazon list was 2,373,448.
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Pick of the week
Laurel and Hardy
New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme
Comedic exhumation of classic duo on stage, by Tom McGrath.
The Penelopiad
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Repositioning of The Odyssey by Margaret Atwood, as seen through the eyes of Penelope. Very clever.
Carmen Jones
Royal Festival Hall, London SE1
Hammerstein takes Bizet's opera and reworks it in the American South. Jude Kelly directs.
