There are so many fascinating ideas crackling through US playwright Christopher Shinn’s ambitious, rambling new state-of-the-world play ‘Against’ that I just bitterly wish his dialogue didn’t make me want to punch my own ears off.
Luke (Ben Whishaw) is a youthful American tech tycoon who believes he has heard the voice of God. And God has told him he must ‘go where there’s violence’. This has been going on for six months now, and, as Luke confides to his colleague Sheila (Amanda Hale), he can no longer ignore it – he is going to go on a personal crusade to try and change humanity and suppress its violence.
Over the almost three hours of Ian Rickson’s production, Whishaw’s Luke becomes a strange mix of Elon Musk, Thomas Newton and Jesus. His attempts to mingle among real people and truly understand the nature of violence leads to a huge following and quasi-Messianic status.
These efforts take him down all sorts of strange pathways and cul-de-sacs, but ultimately ‘Against’ becomes a heartfelt poser about whether capitalism itself is a form of violence and whether our innate humanity can survive our technology.
The problem is the bloody dialogue. Maybe the issue is my chronic aversion to earnestness, but seriously: every single character in ‘Against’ talks like they’ve been in therapy for about a century, forensically excavating their feelings and obsessing over them like they’re weird alien objects, talking about them literally for hours and saying things like: ‘I have to work on myself.’ I had so little empathy for Luke and Sheila’s wordy-but-bloodless will they/won’t they relationship that it felt like I was watching two people doing sums. A scene in which one minor character furiously castigates another for writing a ‘sex-negative’ depiction of a polyamorous relationship in her draft novel raised a big laugh, but by this point I was completely confused over Shinn’s intent.
I’m normally a big fan of Rickson’s hard, serious direction, and he puts in some nice flourishes, like the jazzy interludes, but perhaps he’s too po-faced for a play already so couched in therapese. I think perhaps there’s a bone-dry humour under all this that just doesn’t connect. It certainly reads a bit better on the page.
If the show does have its Saviour, it’s Whishaw, an electric actor who I’ve never seen make a safe choice or produce a duff performance, and he sells us Luke in spite of what Luke is made to say. He makes this eccentric mogul a compelling mix of distance and intimacy, leaning in to talk to the most unpromising strangers with a zealot’s disregard for personal space, but strangely terrified – even crushed – by normal human interaction, cowering behind the arm he throws up like a barrier when confronted over his feelings for Sheila. It’s an excellent performance at the head of a rock-solid ensemble. It’s just – gah! – the words.