The Garden Party

Corpus Playroom, 16-20th November, 7pm. £5-6

Directed by Toby Jones

[rating:5/5]

This is one of the most interesting productions I’ve seen in Cambridge. In a theatre scene that relies far more on Themes than ideas, The Garden Party is resolutely conceptual. It is regrettably rare to go to a play here and spend the entire 90-odd minutes having your synapses tickled, but Toby Jones’ production was relentlessly thought-provoking. Perhaps more importantly, it was enjoyably so.

Vaclav Havel’s play presents, as 20th century plays have a habit of doing, a vision of a totalitarian regime. This isn’t yer GCSE set text’s totalitarian regime, however. Eschewing the red lights, black coats and wet grit of the average Orwell manqué, The Garden Party highlights instead the absurd bureaucracy. Apart from two bookend scenes at the protagonist’s family home, the action is confined to various ludicrous state departments – the most prominent being the eponymous garden party of the Liquidation Committee.

The style is a Stoppardian perspective on a Kafkan system; literate absurdism being hurried through a maze of murderous bureaucracy. If this doesn’t sound particularly fun, it should – Havel’s script is like having a very intense drunken supervision with Slavoj Zizek, and Jones’ direction brings out all the madness without sacrificing the intellect.

The opening is a glorious, teasing bit of verfremdungseffekt; a good five minutes of teased expectations that brings to mind my co-editor’s beloved Stewart Lee. The latter is a comedian who brings ideas from free jazz to his stand-up, and that was present here too – an insistent repetition that teeters pleasingly between harmonious and atonal. The protagonist, Hugo, is playing chess with himself while his mother and father look on from the kitchen table, occasionally interrupting with pragmatic advice couched in deranged symbolism.

Max Upton, as Hugo’s father, does a very good job imbuing these proverbs, which sound like Polonius had he been allowed to survive into dementia, with a sense of earnest helpfulness. Ami Jones, as the mother, gives a similarly warm characterisation, even when banishing their silent second son to various places around the house (he is, after all, a bourgeois intellectual). Although resolutely absurdist from the outset, this homely opening manages to somehow render the protagonist sympathetic, a rare feat in absurdism.

The acting is excellent throughout – James Parris’ Hugo is a Lynchian lynchpin, at once enigmatic and ingenuous. Lawrence Bowles and Olivia Stocker, in a star-cross’d bureaucratic romance, have a wonderfully uncomfortable chemistry, reciting regulations like blank verse. Ben Blyth gives a disconcerting turn as a neurotically-cheery Inaugurator, declaiming like a death-bed Flashheart. And Laurie Coldwell gets a lot of comic mileage from the fact that he is in his underwear (his clothes, as per the rules, are being liquidated). Even the two smallest characters – Jones’ cameo as the mute intellectual and Siân Docksey as his lover – bring a sweet silliness to the harsh farce that surrounds them.

The problem with reviewing a play that does so many interesting things with a very interesting script is that I don’t want to spoil any of the surprises. So I will avoid the Reithian imperative to inform, and leave you hungrily ignorant. The Garden Party is slick, clever and, perhaps most importantly, not what Cambridge is used to. If Now, Now is as good as m’colleague says then the Corpus Playroom is the place to be all night this week.