Shipwreck review, Almeida, London N1: dazzling wordsmithery with only modest concrete gains
If those who voted to Remain have it bad, adrift in a political moment they are struggling to comprehend, spare a thought for America’s liberal left, baffled almost to distraction by the conviction-overturning ascendency of the 45th president. How on earth did he happen?
American playwright Anne Washburn persuasively imagines the Trump phenomenon in her new play as a crisis of empathy. It’s set over one snowy weekend in the immediate aftermath of the James Comey testimony to the Senate Intelligence committee, as a group of New York liberals gather at the remote farmhouse of an old friend. Armed with all the hyper-aware articulacy of the woke progressive, they can talk of nothing but the calamity engulfing their country and, by implication, the existential threat to people such as themselves.
Running parallel are flashback scenes between the previous occupants of the farmhouse, a white couple and their adopted Kenyan-born son Mark (Fisayo Akinade, superb), who has grown up happily and unquestioningly within a white rural community, preferring new wave music over Prince, but who in idle moments imagines himself inside another alternative existence, as a boy sold into slavery.
Washburn is a writer of extraordinarily pellucid, flexing dialogue, which is just as well since there is an extraordinary amount of it here. Slowly, stealthily, she sticks the boot into her (all white except for Yusuf, a lawyer) symbolically marooned city dwellers: as the snow cuts out the electricity and access to the grocery store, their liberal pieties are revealed to be dangerously complacent, simultaneously racially aware and catastrophically out of touch, and bound up almost entirely in social media virtue signalling.
The role of art as a response to political crisis is a secondary self-reflexive thread: should art directly reflect the current moment, or approach it obliquely? In two break-out sequences, Washburn tries out satirical fantasy, casting Trump as a mock Hollywood hero squaring up to George Bush over Iraq, and as a Satanic figure in gold body paint, appearing to James Comey surrounded by hooded acolytes. Neither, to be honest, achieve much.
Director Rupert Goold fluently marshals an excellent cast that includes Tara Fitzgerald as an earthy hippy, and Justine Mitchell expertly inhabiting a smug but nervy hand-wringer with a penchant for putting her foot in her mouth. But it’s a wordy, extremely long evening that spends far too much time in the self satisfied company of Washburn’s shell-shocked weekenders.
Far more gripping are the scenes featuring Mark, possessed, it turns out, of tremendous levels of imaginative empathy, and his father, a decent Christian conservative who thoughtfully defends his decision to vote for Trump. Washburn is a wordsmith of dazzling breadth, but the concrete gains yielded here feel disproportionately small.
Until March 30. Tickets: 020 7359 4404; almeida.co.uk
