the end of history - Royal Court Theatre

Just booked front row for the end of June, mainly because of the presence of Morrissey and Sharp in that cast list: I'm surprised tickets hadn't gone a lot quicker, to be honest.

Has anyone see this yet? Planning a trip to London and trying to decide if I should add this to the roster! Thanks!!

Seeing it on Saturday, I’ll post thoughts after (probably from one of the watering holes in the vicinity of the Square)

I want to say it was like Love Love Love and Tribes had a baby, except such a description probably oversells it. I definitely came away feeling like I hadn't seen anything original, and I don't know if it even had a point? The terrific cast meant it was far from a wasted evening, but they deserve better material and my opinion of Jack Thorne as a writer is not particularly favourable right now.

I had been thinking of booking tickets for this one, but reading this I don’t think I will bother now.

If it helps at all I’m at the complete other end of opinion for this. I thought that it was excellent. Funny, nicely paced and then heartbreaking.

I think it's wonderfully entertaining, and somewhat moving too, with great performances, but it isn't a classic political work destined to be remembered, primarily because it's more like a series of skits, than skillfully focused. I had great fun notwithstanding.

Some spoilers follow. . .

Unlike Bartlett's "Love Love Love," which had a laser-like 'right-wing' focus on taking down progressivism, this is a genuine 'left-wing' show, which addresses the difficulties of being progressive, and the difficulties of being the children of progressives, while affirming those underlying progressive values.

What this work most resembles is an updated version Arnold Wesker's "Chicken Soup with Barley," in that it follows a left-wing family over 20 years of political drift (1997 - 2017) exactly as Wesker's play did (1936 - 1956).

It is funnier than Wesker's play, as it is informed by skittish comic mischief from first to last, which is also why it is less successful as a whole than Wesker's play, lacking that play's focus. For instance, I laughed like a drain at an elongated skit about male and female naked selfies, performed masterfully by a precisely nasal, yet lazily sardonic Kate O'Flynn.

In the casting, there is a nod to Flynn's previous National Theatre project, "A Taste of Honey," as again she finds her whole personality encroached upon and defined by an overweening mother, again played by Lesley Sharp, again on top ditzy comic form, but this time informed by greater wellsprings of genuine love and affection. For me, it's O'Flynn and Sharp who bring the most laughs, though all the excellent actors get their moments.

As Marwood said, Morrissey's principal moment comes toward the end, when he is tasked with pretending that all this isn't light comedy, and delivers us a dominating dose of Weskerian progressively political punch. Like in the Wesker play, Morrissey's patriarch walks in his wife's political shadow, but not because he is tragically weak and unprincipled (as in the Wesker) but because he is humorously strong and over-principled. This once again tends towards making this a comic entertainment (and Morrissey is a natural bombastic comedian, as he showed us in Hangmen), rather than a state of the nation play.

Still, the State of the Nation is very much under consideration if only because this show takes us from Blair to Brexit, and while it exposes life's endless compromises, it nonetheless makes a strong case for ever-trying to revive the ever-flailing corpse of progressivism.

I enjoyed the whole cast, and outside of the three principals above, I especially Laurie Davidson's weak young amiable drug-addled sibling, whose role seemed somewhat informed by a very similar character played at the National by Rory Kinnear in "Last of the Haussmans," another State of the Nation play.

This play may only be a blip in the history of political plays, rather than the "end of history" promised, but I found it the funniest and most entertaining of these types of shows, despite not being the most impactful.

4 stars from me.

The Stage sums it up as "absorbing but aimless", which was my impression. I was interested to read the Guardian interview with Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, as this made clear what the writer intended but I don't think he achieved it.

That’s basically how the Court works if you’re high profile enough. They believe in “trusting writers” which is... lovely but at least in some cases equates to “no notes, whatever draft you give us is what’ll get put on stage.”

This comment completely reflects what me and my fellow attendees were talking about in the pub afterwards. Rarely do I ever suggest a play should be longer than it is, but I felt like we didn't spend enough time with the family, on the politics, on the events of their lives, to really feel much at the end of the play. You neither get a satisfying emotional conclusion nor a political one, and it just ends up feeling a bit empty as you walk out.