‘Cancelling Socrates’ Jermyn Street Theatre – Review
If it was easy to write a play, there would be better ones more often in the West End and on our regional boards. But it’s not. So increasingly we rejoice in the classics (whatever that means) and loads of stuff from yesteryear, often out of copyright, rather than re-perform the drivel that oft now passes for ‘theatre darling’, attracting at best the friends of someone inexpensive in the cast or otherwise somehow attached and who may, on a good day, fill both seats above the pub.
Rarely then, does a new play excite the clever cells of a less invested audience, an audience made up of, say, occupants of the average Bakerloo tube carriage, they who might once have been found indeed upon the Clapham omnibus.
But here, from the quill of Howard Brenton, comes a sparkling new play, a play which one of my more excitable fellow critics described, in a spontaneous, unscripted eruption in the interval so sotto voce as to have been unfortunately missed by only the most distant seats, as ‘the best thing’ she had ever seen.
Hyperbole perhaps, but the excitement in her experienced eyes told it was genuinely felt. As Mr Brenton remarked when I suggested she tell him herself, ‘Well, you’ve only seen half of it.’ So, dear reader, will you enjoy both halves as much as I did? If your humour is tickled by Wilde or the funnier bits of Shaw, or the stage directed charm of Barrie, or your mind excited by matters philosophical or lexical; in short, if you are more sudoku than snakes and ladders, more lingual than Love Island, then you deserve this play, reveling as it does in the no longer fashionable art of free thinking. I’d love to say there is lots of modern writing to match it or exceed it, but there isn’t. For as long as we continue to be blessed with new stuff from older skins, there remains a standard by which any new wannabe classics can be judged.
For Sophie Ward, as Socrates’ mistress, the inconvenience of the female form is harvested as a means to an end, while his wife Xanthippe (Hannah Morrish) implores with the voice of a frightened angel. Robert Mountford does double comedy bubble as both Euthyphro and the Gaoler – we are the better for it – and Jonathan Hyde plays Socrates, a wordy role perhaps, but so too was Socrates, cartoonish perhaps, but you’ve seen the sculptures.
Yes indeed, if we gave out stars, we’d give it lots.
By Chris Parkinson