Village Idiot Review

Theatre Royal Stratford East, London – until 6 May 2023

Reviewed by Alun Hood

2**

Collaborative theatre partnership Ramps On The Moon’s goals – to amplify and encourage the representation of disabled and deaf people in mainstream theatre – are essential and admirable, and some of it’s past productions, including versions of The Government Inspector, Oliver Twist and The Who’s Tommy, have wielded unique freshness and power. Each of those shows were founded on rock solid stories then retold with wit, fire and originality. The 2023 offering, debutant writer Samson Hawkins’s Village Idiot, co-produced by Nottingham Playhouse and Stratford East and helmed by the East London venue’s Artistic Director Nadia Fall, is an entirely new play. It would be lovely to report that the winning streak continues and that they have struck gold. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a stinker.

Village Idiot feels like Hawkins has ingested great chunks of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, swirled in elements of gay romance, climate change panic, Mischief Theatre and sheer bad taste, and hurled the whole lot at the wall to see what sticks. It’s a confused mess of a play, like a faulty firework that explodes off into a number of different directions before subsiding in a whimper. There are some really interesting ideas, a fair bit of zany humour, but rather too many times where you’re left scratching your head in bewilderment.

Hawkins has set his play in the rural Northamptonshire village of Syresham where the long term family homes are under threat of compulsory purchase order due to the controversial High Speed Rail network being put in to link London and Birmingham. The locals are not taking it lying down though, especially not potty mouthed, permanently off-her-meds grandma Barbara (Eileen Nicholas) or cheerfully aggressive butcher Kevin (Mark Benton) and his closeted gay son Liam (Joseph Langdon). Meanwhile Peter, Barbara’s openly gay grandson (Philip Labey) is back for a visit from “that London” and a touching (in every sense) relationship is starting up between Kevin’s daughter Debbie (Faye Wiggan) and Barbara’s other grandson Harry (Maximilian Fairley). Aggrieved country dwellers taking on big business isn’t a particularly original plot strand but Hawkins is on about a lot more than that.

Domestic moments or scenes set in the surrounding woods (lovely sylvan set by Lily Arnold) are interspersed with acts from a variety show fundraiser that the Syresham community are putting on. Mildly amusing as these are (there’s a Cher-inspired drag act, a magician, some stand-up comedy, a couple of songs) most of them go on way too long; we get the gist that this show is thrown together by a bunch of people lacking in natural talent but, after being subjected to what feels like hours of it, you just start to feel like you’re watching pretty bad theatre.

It’s never really clear where Hawkins stands on any of the topics raised. He paints a picture of rural life being fairly brutal and narrow-minded, then has Barbara shrilly extolling the virtues of it as though all other environments and lifestyles are inherently toxic and evil. His characters frequently say the apparently unsayable and one assumes that’s supposed to be shocking but it mainly comes across as unfocused and unconvincing. The threats of violence are bad enough but the gay slurs are pretty hard to listen to. You can get away with a lot if you’re screamingly funny enough, but most of what’s said here is just witless and unnecessarily crude. Cosy and confrontational simultaneously is hard to pull off, and feels like what this play is aiming for, but never achieves.

The lurch into preaching about saving the planet with the cast staggering about dressed up like nightmarish versions of giant woodland animals is eye-rollingly pretentious, and needs to be seen to be believed. Fall’s uncertain staging doesn’t help. It might have worked better had there been a sharp differentiation between the variety show sections and the “real” scenes. As it is, too much seems sloppy where it should be savage, and lacking in pace and conviction.

There are compensations. Seeing a love story between a pair of neurodiverse people onstage is an all-too-rare occurrence and is handled rather beautifully here (Wiggan in particular displays a quietly killer comic timing). Langdon convincingly evokes Liam’s vulnerability and pain, and Benton uses his cuddly persona to ingenious, chilling effect when he periodically lets the mask slip to show the brutality underneath, although some of his character motivations and sudden changes of attitude make no sense at all. Fairley cleverly suggests a simmering aggression under Harry’s stand-up act, and gets a last minute speech declaring his warts-and-all love for Debbie that almost brings the house down.

It feels like there is a stronger, more original play struggling to get out of Village Idiot but it will take a more rigorous director and an unscrupulous editor to find it. At the moment, it’s a challenge to sit through, despite the efforts of a game cast. It runs the gamut from sweet to excruciating in an overlong two and a half hours.