James Corden is a good actor. It may be galling to say that given his, uh, ‘divisive’ public persona. But the man’s stage record is undeniable. He made his theatre debut in the original production of Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’ and conquered the world in his personal vehicle ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’. And if it’s unlikely to match up to the success of those last two, he very much does ‘it’ again with Joe Penhall’s new play ‘The Constituent’.
In his most serious role to date, Corden plays Alec, a fraying Afghan War veteran struggling with the disintegration of the willfully normie life he built for himself after leaving the army. He settled down with a wife, kids and a dog. But it’s all gone to hell thanks to his erratic, paranoid behaviour. Now he’s going through the family courts in an effort to regain access to his children, although whether his children want this is unclear
Alec’s great hope is Monica (Anna Maxwell Martin), his hardworking local MP, a diligent, Labour-coded backbencher who he went to primary school with and knows his mum. He is working as an electrician, and they reconnect when he instals a new security system for her, becoming convinced along the way that she might hold the key to restabilising his life.
Speaking in long, fast, slightly syntactically askew sentences, Corden is both amusing and unsettling as Alec, a plain-speaking man with a core of likeability who has nonetheless become palpably unmoored from reality, whose anger and and unpredictability make it abundantly apparent why he’s lost his family.
And Maxwell Martin is terrific as Monica (who is also tremendously written by Penhall). She is, quite clearly, a deeply caring person who wants to do right by her community and is prepared to put in the hard yards when it comes to her job. No splashy ministerial job for her - for much of ‘The Constituent’ she’s dealing (at enormous length) with the fallout from the local lollipop lady being made redundant. She also really genuinely wants to help Alec, even when his behaviour starts to get palpably stalker-ish.
And yet she’s not a saint, not simply a nice normal lady doing her best - she has a lawyer’s mind and often interrupts Alec with pedantic technical and legal points, or offers long-winded, complex explanations for things everyone else clearly wishes were simple. She cares. But she has a sort of technocratic distance that winds up Alec, who probably just wants a hug and to be told everything will be fine.
Staged on a narrow traverse, with its scenes delineated by increasingly mangled shards of The Smiths’ ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’, it’s not hard to see ‘The Constituent’ as a descendent of Penhall’s most famous play ‘Blue/Orange’, which explored a white psychiatrist’s responsibility towards a vulnerable Black patient. The jobs, ethnicities and specific vulnerabilities have changed. But both plays are thoughtful, probing dramas about damaged masculinity and the morality of British institutions.
Where ‘The Constituent’ unfortunately goes off the rails is in the introduction of a third character. At first Zachary Hart’s paranoid Brummie police officer Mellor seems like a reasonable addition to the story: Monica is getting increasingly worried about Alec’s obsessive behaviour, but doesn’t qualify for proper ministerial protection. But eventually Mellor’s ludicrous behaviour blows up the whole play and unbalances the carefully wrought clash between Monica and Alec. Even when Mellor is out of the equation, Matthew Warchus’s hitherto finely-balanced production feels trivialised and diminished. Penhall perhaps makes a couple of valid points about the British police. But really it feels like he wasn’t sure where to take the story so decided to throw in Mellor as a very crude curveball.
It’s a decent play and opening in the middle of a general election campaign, it’s nothing if not timely, and Corden and (especially) Maxwell Martin are great. It’s not the era-defining blockbuster Corden’s two previous stage outings were. But it proves he’s an actor of range and substance, while there is simply no world in which 90 minutes in the company of Anna Maxwell Martin is a bad thing.