Gordon Brown can rest easy on one front: verse playwright Glen Maxwell’s French Revolution drama is never going to get the groundlings storming Parliament, despite plummeting Thames-side temperatures that seem designed to foment discontent. ‘Liberty’ is a subtle, sedate and surprisingly bloodless account of the Jacobin Terror: stabbed bodies in bathtubs are out; tub-thumping idealists and witty provocateurs are in. That’s partly down to Maxwell’s source. Anatole France was the toast of the belle époque and the epigrammatically witty script Maxwell extrudes from his 1912 novel ‘Les Dieux ont Soif’ plays a bit like six characters in search of Wilde who unexpectedly find realpolitik à la Bernard Shaw instead.
Barbed repartee doesn’t always carry out of the drawing room. The leisurely opening picnic scene where the flirtatious six (two bohemian painters; a cynical actress and an ingénue; an ambitious society matron and an ex-Duke) paint a glowing picture of the recent revolution through their games and teases, is too elegant for the open-air setting. However, after starry-eyed young artist Evariste (David Sturzaker) becomes a magistrate in Robespierre’s new world, Maxwell compellingly shows how his black-and-white fanaticism crushes them all. As legal proof is abandoned in favour of accusation as the criteria for determining guilt, all roads lead to the chopping block. Director Guy Retallack fails to give much sense of ‘The People’ – who are represented either in sub ‘Les Mis’ choruses or by two cheesed-off old soldiers. By the time the production pans out to make the audience into the mob, it’s too late to get a visceral grip on things. And Maxwell’s six characters, though touching and intelligently drawn, never come together as a great mirror for political conflict – past or present.
