Great Britain at the Haymarket and King Charles III at the Wyndham

In October I went to see Great Britain, a satire about a newspaper that is a thinly disguised News of the World during the period in which hacking became a form of news gathering that that paper favoured. The play had transferred from the National Theatre and it seemed to me that the production did not fit very well on the more constrained stage of the Haymarket. It was brisk and competent but pretty unsubtle. I struck me as ephemeral and both geographically and historically extremely particular. In other words, it was very clever but not universal, purely a play about a certain time in one country's development. Of course, a play about a certain time in one country's development can also become a play about universal issues, but this play is parochial and I doubt it will last beyond its own era.

King Charles III shared a similar navel gazing 'What is Britain, who are we, what have we become?' theme with Great Britain. I suppose the interesting thing to an outsider is the very fact that Britain is feeling so extremely concerned about itself and its place in the world. However, if you are not particularly involved with Britain, spending two whole evenings watching plays in which issues of national identity other than your own are examined can feel a bit like observing the Christmas dinner squabbles of a family you haven't been introduced to.

All the same King Charles III is impressive in that the playwright chose to write it in blank verse and did a very good job. To begin with, it has some rather wonderful theatrical tableaux too - moments that make you glad you have come out into the night to sit with strangers, witnessing something beautiful and strange. However, after the interval the character of Charles loses coherence - from being a man of principle in the first part, he turns into a power-crazed nutter, with very little transition to explain this shift, in the second. In addition, the constitutional crisis that is the crux of the play lacked drama for me because, a) I'd seen how a very similar crisis was dealt with without any violence in my own country and b) Belgium was able to deal with their monarch's inability to approve a bill dealing with abortion (he was a devout Catholic and he and his wife had suffered numerous miscarriages, so the issue carried a great deal of emotional weight for him) without a crisis ensuing.

I also experienced a growing sense of discomfort as the play went on and I became more and more aware that the characters were not even flimsily disguised but, instead, actually meant to be the stage counterparts of living flesh-and-blood people who lived just down the road. There was a kind of cruelty to having the actors playing out the ill-motivated imaginary actions of real human beings who were still alive but had no right of reply.