[title]
‘The Angry Brigade’ is a play about anarchists, and to that end wunderkind writer James Graham has rather gamely issued a text note saying that the director can stage its dual plot lines – one following the titular ’70s terrorist cell, the other following the police squad assigned to track them down – in any order they choose.
As with a lot of anarchist ideas, I wonder if this is a bit better in theory than in practise. Where the script cuts to and fro between the plot lines, James Grieve’s production for Paines Plough takes the decision to stage the entire police story before the interval, and the entire Angry Brigade one after.
While this probably saves the four-strong cast a collective nervous breakdown – they each play multiple characters even within the separate stories – the fact is that the funny, stylised, slightly Pythonesque first story about a quartet of square police officers trying to comprehend the motives of the Angry Brigade feels lightweight on its own. From the moment splendidly versatile ‘Harry Potter’ survivor Harry Melling dons an officer’s uniform and bristly tache to launch into a bizarre monologue about the anarchy of dunking biscuits in tea, it’s good fun, but flyweight in its thin, eccentric characters.
Far far stronger is the – ironically much less anarchic – second half, which follows the real-life cell. It is mostly focussed on the relationship between Anna (Pearl Chanda) and Jim (Melling), as their attempts to forge a brave new world collide with their human frailties. Troubled, working class Jim drifts off behind a harsh curtain of ideology, swallowing his decency to devote himself to the task in hand; Anna struggles to cope with the idea of killing innocent bystanders, of abandoning all social niceties and creature comforts. Chanda and Melling turn in the standout performances of the show in a moving and empathetic section that feels like it has much to say in an age where more of our young people are being radicalised by extremist causes than ever.
I suspect that you’d get a stronger play if ‘The Angry Brigade’ were performed as written: as it is the laughs are all in one half, and the feeling in the other. Still, it hardly tanks, and there’s a sort of retro charm in effectively presenting it as a first rate play preceded by its eccentric b-movie.