Plot goes off with a bang

Kevin Harvey and Barry Aird star in Speaking Like Magpies.

10 April 2012

Everyone knows the ending to the Gunpowder Plot: nothing happened. Guy Fawkes and his Catholic co-conspirators were sentenced to death and James I went on to rule Protestant Britain for a further 20 years.

Yet Frank McGuinness's new play, an RSC commission to complete their Gunpowder Season, is hamstrung by the playwright's apparent anxiety over the familiarity of his subject matter. At the start, he needlessly asks how one should tell a story that everyone knows, then ties himself in knots trying to find the answer.

It does, however, begin with a bang, as a line of gunpowder fizzes across the stage. William Houston's manic, capricious James I has just dreamed of the death of Elizabeth I, which will make him king of England. In similarly prophetic manner, his early reign is haunted by the possibility of a Catholic uprising, partly prompted by his own savage treatment of Catholics.

Yet rather than provide an intellectual shape to the religious fanaticism of the time, McGuinness opts instead for a more abstract depiction of its psychological mood. Here, religious devotion, guilt, conspiracy and betrayal are feverishly portrayed by director Rupert Goold in a hotchpotch of masque, song, incantation and dream sequences.

A key character called The Equivocator, a demonic, satyr-like character played by Kevin Harvey (pictured left with Barry Aird), wanders about playing devil's advocate but his function feels more allegorical than a useful illustration of the era's lethal moral ambiguity.

Houston is as watchable as ever but there is a bewildering lack of point and plot to this play whose fascination with fundamentalism should really be ticking multiple parallel boxes.

Until Sat, Trafalgar Studio 1, Whitehall SW1, Mon to Sat 7.30pm, Wed and Sat mats 2pm, £18 to £34, £5 to £20 concs. Tel: 0870 060 6632. Tube: Charing Cross

Speaking Like Magpies

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Plot goes off with a bang

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