Alma Mater - Almeida

I caught this at the Wednesday matinee which was recorded for the V and A archive, so, should I wish to do so, I could track down and watch the same performance again lol.

I won't though, because while I thought the smarts and themes of the play were great, I found it a dry and insufficiently characterised show.

Some spoilers follow. . .

This very much put me in mind of Yeats's most quoted poem:

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

Basically, Justine Mitchell's Jo is the falconer who can't keep hold of her falcon; she's the centre that cannot hold. She thinks she can talk people into reason, that she can deal with stuff case by case, but she's living in a world that's spiraling into camps, and everyone's got a lawyer except her.

Most of the characters other than Jo are unlikeable: one kid has a lawyer to justify wrecking paintings; one kid doesn't give a fig about a rape victim's wishes; the rapists Mum is on a rampage (to be fair, Susanah Wise's line that Uni boys these days need a "backpack of consent forms" was genuinely funny) to protect her never-depicted son; the headmaster (or whatever he is) quotes Omar Khayyam poetry but is responsible for the Uni's regressive culture.

The rape victim doesn't even believe she's been raped at first, but concludes it must have happened, because although she and the rapist were both blotto and neither can remember a thing, she WOULD have demanded a condom be used, and since it wasn't, she reasons she must have been raped in the event she can't recall. Mitchell's Jo thinks a distinction should be made between deliberate violent rapes and rapes noone can remember, she thinks that rape victims should talk to her themselves rather than activists who claim to be representing said victims in the course of their activism, but of course, for Jo, the world has moved on, and case-by-case reasonableness is only going to get her well and truly Yeats-ed!

All this, I thought, was great stuff, and I appreciated the way the playwright didn't take obvious sides, and just presented her "facts."

But in culture wars plays that have moved me, like "Prima Facie" (Jodie Comer raging against rape laws) or "Eureka Day" (Helen Hunt raging against vaccine mandates), so much character work was put in by those respective playwrights to get us loving the characters and worlds before those worlds were torn apart.

Here, almost every word everyone says is part of the playwright's schematics to set up the themes. There are no characters to root for in and of themselves. Apart from Jo, everyone is a cipher.

I loved the themes, I didn't love the characters. I thought Justine Mitchell (off book) was terrific, and boy, did she have a huge amount of lines to learn, which she put across with absolute scorn and conviction.

But overall, the other two plays I cited above riled me up emotionally much much more than this play as I was involved in the worlds of those plays before the action kicked off. 3 and a half stars from me for this show.