The Constituent
James Corden is a good actor. It may be galling to say that given his, uh, ‘divisive’ public persona. But the man’s stage record is undeniable. He made his theatre debut in the original production of Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’ and conquered the world in his personal vehicle ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’. And if it’s unlikely to match up to the success of those last two, he very much does ‘it’ again with Joe Penhall’s new play ‘The Constituent’. In his most serious role to date, Corden plays Alec, a fraying Afghan War veteran struggling with the disintegration of the willfully normie life he built for himself after leaving the army. He settled down with a wife, kids and a dog. But it’s all gone to hell thanks to his erratic, paranoid behaviour. Now he’s going through the family courts in an effort to regain access to his children, although whether his children want this is unclear Alec’s great hope is Monica (Anna Maxwell Martin), his hardworking local MP, a diligent, Labour-coded backbencher who he went to primary school with and knows his mum. He is working as an electrician, and they reconnect when he instals a new security system for her, becoming convinced along the way that she might hold the key to restabilising his life. Speaking in long, fast, slightly syntactically askew sentences, Corden is both amusing and unsettling as Alec, a plain-speaking man with a core of likeability who has nonetheless become palpably unmoored from reality, whose anger and and unpredictabil
