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Private View/Protest
Until Nov 28 2008
This event has finished
Orange Tree Theatre, 1 Clarence St, London, TW9 2SA
Rating:
By Brian Logan

Posted: Mon Nov 17 2008
It’s not every day you get to deliver the line ‘goodbye – and thanks for all the groombles’. This is Mike Sengelow as Václav Havel’s hero Vanek, bidding farewell after a visit to his frightful friends. He’s just been subjected to a ‘private view’ of Michael and Vera’s house, their sex life, their electronic almond-peeler from Switzerland – and the gourmet groombles (canapés) Vera has prepared for him. The pair are persuading Vanek to abandon his ascetic life of political protest and embrace personal development. Sengelow spends the play with a look of pained bewilderment – think Tim from ‘The Office’ – furrowed on to his features. Treacly Stuart Fox and Carolyn Backhouse are terrific as the smug couple who, as they protest with mounting desperation, ‘have [Vanek’s] best interests at heart’.

Written in 1975, ‘Private View’ dramatises the unease spread by dissidents (like Havel) among those who acquiesce in the status quo. So does its companion piece ‘Protest’, which ruthlessly skewers liberal hypocrisy. Here, Vanek invites his old friend Stanek, a well-heeled TV writer, to sign a protest against the political imprisonment of a Czech pop star. Stanek ties himself in knots seeking justification for his refusal to do so. The play anatomises Stanek’s evasions with forensic precision, as he accuses Vanek of humiliating him, and insists that ‘not everyone can be a champion of human rights’. In Sam Walters’s very funny production, both plays give the compromised enough rope to hang themselves, while Vanek/Havel sits there, beadily (or self-righteously) looking on. Like the bastard offspring of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, the plays combine lacerating comedy of manners with a still-challenging invitation to take moral responsibility for the choices we make.