Theatre
The phoney revolution
Published 30 August 2007
British political history isn't quite brought to life, but it's a valiant effort
Holding Fire! Shakespeare's Globe, London SE1
The year is 1837 and Chartism, a new political movement demanding votes for all men, regardless of wealth, is causing unrest across Britain. Nothing as exciting as a real hot-blooded revolution is going on, but the Chartists, led by William Lovett, were certainly provocative, organising marches and demonstrations, and eventually braving jail for their beliefs. This is the background against which Jack Shepherd's Holding Fire! is set.
The main problem with putting the Chartists on stage - as opposed to, say, a revolution featuring people being guillotined - is that all of them seem to have been such decent chaps. Even when Lovett (Peter Hamilton Dyer) ends up in prison, the main issue seems to be whether he is going to be allowed to eat one of his wife's apple pies. While vaguely affecting, this is hardly the stuff of Sydney Carton. With "Peace and Order" as their motto, the worthy Chartists were never going to turn the British working classes into the bloodthirsty sans-culottes.
Shepherd tries to pep things up a bit by positioning his political narrative around a fictional love story between Lizzie (Louise Callaghan), a poor but ambitious London girl, and Will (Craig Gazey), a bootboy at the grand house oop north where she finds work. Although both actors do their best, the title of the play seems to apply as much to their love affair as it does to the events that surround them.
Of the leading Chartists, only Feargus O'Connor (Jonathan Moore) ever seems to get the bit between his teeth, although even he seems unable to commit to a violent struggle. Meanwhile, his adversary General Charles Napier (played rather magnificently by Philip Bird in a feathered hat) manages to outfox O'Connor's rhetoric by the simple tactic of also holding fire, thus denying him a bloodbath and a martyr's death.
For all that, Mark Rosenblatt's direction tirelessly exploits the possibilities of the Globe. The groundlings in the standing area become the rabble during bouts of public speaking, and the upper galleries are constantly invaded by gentlemen politicians. For one remarkable illustration of the excesses of the industrial age, the stage trapdoor is opened, belching clouds of smoke and a dying youth.
Shepherd has clearly done his research, and shows how public unrest flickered across the land by moving his cast fluently from the taverns of London to the great houses of the north via factories, boxing rings, bits of moorland and the Marshalsea debtors' jail. For once, Britain is not characterised as London, and the play shows all layers of British society.
Yet the action never becomes as formidably alive as it should. The stage seems empty, rather than pulsating with a roaring crowd. Though Shepherd claims to have written an "epic", I have seen productions with a cast of five more suited to that weary description.
However, he does humour well; a scene where an impoverished London family pretends that the father is dying, in order to get a guinea from a well-meaning aristocrat, is terrific, as is an episode where the young Victoria and Albert are spoofed for a Christmas pantomime. But these colourful moments are sparse, and the rest of the evening is filled out with either the lovers' tiresome antics or windy political pontificating.
Friedrich Engels (Nicholas Shaw, with a crazy moustache and an equally improbable accent) wanders in and out of the goings-on and puts his educated finger on it. "You have to make people's lives worse in order to make them better," he observes at one point. Maybe part of the problem was that life should have been a bit worse for the working classes in order for a genuine revolution to happen. The Chartists eventually achieved the political changes they were fighting for (via the second, third and fourth Reform Acts), but it was change "rather like the dripping of a tap". And the dripping of a tap has never been a great formula for thrilling drama.
Nevertheless, if your command of British political history is sketchy, this play is a valiant attempt to pull together the threads of a significant but largely forgotten movement.
For further info and booking details visit: http://www.shakespeares-globe.org
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