| Has anyone else seen CORRUPTION? | |
| Posted by: portenopete 02:03 pm EDT 03/12/24 | |
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| Just reading the reviews for CORRUPTION and thinking that, as far as I can see, nobody here has posted about it. I was seduced by the cast, the director and by the fact that I had liked- but not loved- OSLO when I saw it in a regional production and was excited to see this new script in one of its final previews last week. I generally like documentary fiction and have been particularly impressed by the string of hits that the young British playwright James Graham has written over the last decade, even in the cases where I didn't know anything at all about the milieux he is writing about (as in his most recent THIS IS ENGLAND). Maybe it's the result of having been spoiled by the quality of four seasons of SUCCESSION, but this latest tale of the evils of corporate media monopoly and rapacious greed and lust for power felt underbaked, and enervation set in within the first fifteen minutes and didn't improve for the next two-and-a-half hours. Toby Stephens was always one of my favourite young British actors- his Coriolanus at the RSC was stunning- and it's an adjustment to see him now ensconced in middle age. His character Tom Watson- presumably a well-known name in the UK- is a bit of an antihero, rough around the edges and not necessarily a likely candidate to lead a charge in the name of ethics. Stephens has a roguish, laddish charm and does his best to inject energy and life into the proceedings. But he is thwarted by his counterpart, Saffron Burrows, who plays the more familiar (to me) News of the World editor and Murdoch protegée Rebekah Brooks and who seemed tentative and nervous playing a character who is anything but. I wondered how much stage experience she had- I know her only from film- but she does list quite a few credits in her bio. Rather than lift the mundane script and make it at least pulpy fun, her energy drags down proceedings and makes Stephens' job that much harder, robbed of an opponent worthy of doing battle with. And in all those Graham plays I've seen in London, there's always a host of great British character actors tackling the myriad roles these plays demand, ready to shift accents and sensibilities from moment to moment. Naturally it doesn't come as effortlessly to the (largely) American cast at LCT and the sheer Britishness of the story gets a bit lost. Terrific actors like Seth Numrich and Dylan Baker disappeared from memory the second their scenes were done. T. Ryder Smith and K. Todd Freeman managed better- maybe that extra letter at the start of their names gave them a springboard- and transplanted Brit Michael Sibbery faired best of all in the juicy role of the eccentric aristocrat and orgiast Max Mosely whose family name is legendary over several generations and who funded the case against Murdoch and his publications. Most irritating of all were the endless scene changes, where the entire cast and at least four black-ballcapped IATSE crew trudged out to rearrange the tables and chairs that formed the set, usually to no discernible advantage, each setting looking as vague and interchangeable as the one before it. A ring of TV screens hanging above and a large video screen UC allowed for intermittent newscasts and close-ups during the parliamentary hearings over the phone hacking scandal that occupies the centre of the story. They were perfunctory but I sensed that they could have been integrated more creatively and because the play and performances were not entirely compelling I often found my eye drifting skywards to see what might be playing on BBC2. It also struck me that this particular story and the rage that surrounded it when the Levenson Inquiry was called is now more than a decade old. The story feels a little bit like yesterday's news and I wondered why at this juncture Rogers chose to write it and LCT chose to produce it. If the play was better I wouldn't care if it seemed like a middle-of-the-road episode of Succession, but with so many stellar hours spent savouring the machinations of the Roys and their assorted and equally venal apparatchiks, this cast of characters felt distinctly underwhelming. |
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