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Celebrities and protest make for an icky mix – just think of Bob Geldof playing with boats on the Thames in the week before the EU referendum or Sean Penn’s various awkward interventions around the globe. Back in 1972, the actress Jane Fonda pretty much invented the genre: a year after winning an Oscar for ‘Klute’, the 34-year-old American turned up in North Vietnam and was photographed smiling and laughing with enemy troops and anti-aircraft missiles, earning herself the nickname ‘Hanoi Jane’ and becoming a figure of hatred for US troops and folks back home.
This underwhelming and overly sombre and reverent play imagines how 16 years later Fonda was forced to tackle the controversy when confronted in Waterbury, Connecticut by six former US soldiers angry at her plan to shoot a movie in their town. The encounter is real; the detail is imagined by playwright Terry Jastrow who offers an extended, heated but stilted encounter that mostly serves to recall what happened at the time rather than throwing up any new ideas or angles on these events or on the relationship between the media, fame and public opinion.
Fonda is played by screen star Anne Archer (Jastrow is Archer’s husband) in a stiff, defensive style that reminds us that we’re watching ‘Jane Fonda’ rather than a living, breathing human being. Similarly, the five men are more types than flesh and mostly exist to over-emote a series of speeches about their war experiences and, later, jerkily, to concede some ground to their famous guest. Only the conversation between Fonda and the pastor John Clarke (Martin Fisher) feels fully fleshed out.
Joe Harmstrom’s production leans on snatches of film and video footage from the time that cut into the drama rather than lift it. Designer Sean Cavanagh’s backdrop of intertwined maps of Vietnam and the United States covered in the names of many other US foreign ventures is striking – but it also reminds us how Jastrow’s play fails to broaden out its relevance and remains curiously, even weirdly in the clammy grip of celebrity.