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First things first: the ever-progressive New Diorama Theatre has promised its audiences Domino’s pizza after every single show in its new season, and I can report that they’ve delivered in spades. Spades of pizza. There is loads of the stuff, and while carnivores might grumble that it’s all veggie and vegan, to them I would say enjoy your damn free pizza. Honestly, £19 for a play and a slice or three is absurdly good value.
That play, then: from the oft-brilliant Kandinsky theatre company, ‘The Winston Machine’ is nominally a drama about the corrosive effect of Britain’s obsession with its World War II past. But despite the technical proficiency of James Yeatman’s company-devised, Lauren Mooney-dramaturged production, which is full of nostalgic song and virtuosically compressed overlapping scenes, I found the whole thing a bit thin.
I’d braced myself for ‘The Winston Machine’ being somewhat heavy-handed, given that name. But in fact it’s surprisingly hands-off as it sketches a love triangle between Becky (Rachel-Leah Hosker), a young woman going nowhere fast, whose reluctance to commit to buying a house with her straitlaced fiancé Mark (Hamish Macdougall) is further complicated when Lewis (Nathaniel Christian) – a school friend who has had some success as a musician – returns to town.
Becky seeks escape in Instagram posts referencing 1940s fashion and how exciting she feels her grandparents’ lives would have been during the war. With reality so humdrum, it’s perhaps no wonder that she throws herself into nostalgic fantasy both physical and online. We see an absurdly melodramatic fantasy of their lives; her grandad’s old airforce jacket is brought out, pristine and fetishised; eventually we hear of a legacy of violence passed down from the war generation that stands in contrast to Becky’s idea that the war was a wonderful time.
It’s strongly performed, but for all its stylishness never really manages to find a particularly distinctive form until the hallucinatory final furlong, when Lewis finds himself stumbling in horror through a feverishly twisted festival of rank nostalgia.
No sacred cow has been butchered more in theatre than the myth of the so-called greatest generation
And sure, the points it makes are perfectly valid, but it’s so gentle about them that it’s difficult to really see what special insight we’re being offered. No sacred cow has been butchered more in the British theatre than the myth of the so-called greatest generation, and while it’s more than legitimate to continue to question why it remains so persistently romanticised, the script feels like a relatively modest domestic drama that doesn’t muster any real fire until it’s almost over.
Perhaps as somebody raised on a different country’s experience of the war, it just didn’t really click with me: sometimes I find even the British obsession with the British obsession with WWII quite bemusing. But really, my problem is less with what was there than what wasn’t. At not much more than an hour, ‘The Winston Machine’ is a promising start to a play that never actually emerges; it lets its argument rest, just as it’s getting started.