Award-winning company Simple8 have brought a very timely piece to the Southwark Playhouse in Borough. Focused on an American presidential election in a time of political polarity, tensions are high and a feeling of disenfranchisement and an undercurrent of violence are palpable. Then one angry young man decides to take a shot at the president. Sounds familiar?
This is not, though, set in the present day. This is about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, just three days after the end of the Civil War, by John Wilkes Booth. The parallels, however, are clear and they are meant to be – with pictures of assassinations, both failed and successful, on stage including those of Kennedy, Reagan and Trump.
The issues, too, sound strangely current – freedom of speech, freedom in general, profound national division and, perhaps most pertinently, the question of democracy versus tyranny. Booth, who as a child and an adult actor has played out the story of Julius Caesar sees Lincoln as the tyrant here, the man who beggars the South (and Booth is, of course, a Confederate supporter).
Booth himself may not be mad but he could certainly be classed as a narcissist. His background includes a bigamist actor father (who is most definitely a tyrant with his own four children) who has named him for the English journalist and MP, John Wilkes, who was on the American side during the War of Independence. Politics and radicalism are bred in the bone.
He becomes quite a successful actor himself and, of course, his assassination of Lincoln takes place in a theatre, too. Indeed, theatricality is central to this production, both in the flamboyant and mercurial Booth (Brandon Bassir – charming, charismatic and as wily as a fox) and in director Sebastian Armesto’s setting of a stage within a stage.
The production switches back and forth across different time periods (the cast put up boards telling you the date and how far you are from the assassination) so you see Booth as a child with his siblings acting Julius Caesar, as an adult actor, as a lover, as an assassin, as a man on the run. He and the rest of the cast jump with ease from childhood squabbling to political rhetoric to blank verse to song.
There are just six other actors in the company and they all play several roles. As Booth père, Owen Oakeshott is outstanding (as well as creating half a dozen other characters), while Clara Onyemere is an impressive and rather whimsical Lincoln. And what a versatile lot they are – there is singing and several of the cast play the piano and other musical instruments. (This could be loosely described as a musical.)
Land of the Free has some longueurs (the second act could benefit from a bit of tightening up) but this is a compelling piece of theatre and it’s beautifully performed by this impressive company.
Land of the Free is on at the Southwark Playhouse Borough until 9th November. For more information, and for bookings, please visit www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk.
