Land of the Free, Simple8 Theatre Review
Reviewed by Charlotte for Theatre and Tonic
Disclaimer: Gifted tickets in exchange for an honest review
Just in time for the highly anticipated American presidential election, Simple8 Theatre Company premieres their new play with music, Land of the Free, based on the life of President Abraham Lincoln’s infamous assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Co-writers Sebastian Armesto and Dudley Hinton profess that the impetus to stage this story now was its resonance with current events in American politics: deep partisan divides, questions of racial justice, and of course the attempted assassination of Former President Donald Trump. To meet current events as dramatic as these at their level is a lofty goal that Armesto and Hinton unfortunately fail to meet, with Land of the Free struggling to find solid footing in the events of the past, let alone any meaningful interaction with the present.
The play is framed meta-theatrically, which is the strongest decision the otherwise confused production makes, given that Wilkes Booth was himself an actor and that the assassination took place in a theatre. That said, the laboured opening of actors making grand declarations that ‘adults will play kids’ and ‘women will play men’ is not only unnecessary for any audience paying the slightest hint of attention, it foreshadows an overall rudimentary construction. The company spend nearly ten minutes at the top of the show pondering the legacy of the American National Anthem and pantomiming the Statue of Liberty, concepts which may appear roughly in the playwrights’ statement but which are never returned to with any intentionality throughout the play. Indeed, it is difficult to parse out any clear intentions amidst a jumbled array of scenes whose non-linear ordering and variance in style from realistic to melodramatic to musical rob the production of any sense of internal logic. Is Wilkes Booth the story’s protagonist? Anti-hero? Is he even the central character at all? And most importantly, what do these disjointed scenes from his life have to offer to contemporary understandings of American politics, or indeed, their impact on Britons? Land of the Free is unprepared and unable to answer any of these questions.
The company themselves are not untalented, making the best due they can with material that is difficult to sell. The ensemble remains tight even as the writing does not, and in a few rare moments of clarity, they even deliver a handful of laughs and meaningful pauses. But even a company of multi-rolling, instrumentalist performers cannot save this production from its failure to find a voice. It approaches the topic of slavery, the insidious undercurrent of the ensuing civil war, but it stops short of anything deeper than surface level sound-bites on the matter. It touches on Wilkes Booth’s alignment with Southern values, but never on how he came to adopt them. It even spends great portions of act two on his dalliances with two women whose photos were found on his body, but never resolves their relationship to his ideology or his legacy. Instead, it speed-runs its final ten minutes telling another story of another man entirely.
There is plenty in the history of American political violence through which contemporary drama can confront the landscape of today; but, hanging photos of Trump’s bloodied ear and John F. Kennedy dead in his motorcade around the proscenium without a clear dramaturgical connection between then and now is little more than an unsophisticated manner of saying, ‘Look! We’re making a clever point!’ What point it is Simple8 wishes to make in Land of the Free, however, is as yet wholly unclear. And while Armesto and Hinton do disclaim that they are neither experts nor historians, when seeking to raise questions with a piece of theatre, it is a good idea to at least understand the questions you wish to raise and ensure your work actually manages to raise them before putting it on-stage.
At Southwark Playhouse until 9 Nov 2024.
☆ ☆
