A unflinching look at the ugly side of human nature in the wake of 9/11, reviewed by Catherine Love.
In a time of heroes we forget about the anti-heroes, but Neil LaBute's brutal and unflinching 2002 play provides a sharp reminder of the uglier side of human nature. It is 12 September 2001. In the grey, ash-clouded light of early morning on the day after disaster has ripped apart Manhattan, a man and woman in a downtown apartment grapple with the repercussions of the World Trade Centre attacks. So far, so familiar. But the difference in LaBute's dark world is that this couple are wondering whether the tragedy might just be their golden opportunity.
Revived by the Pleasance Theatre to coincide with the tenth anniversary of 9/11, this new stripped down production does not spare the audience any of the ugliness that lies at the heart of LaBute's script. The man and woman are Ben and Abby, an unsatisfied family man and his boss and mistress. At the moment when the planes went into the towers where Ben should have been sitting at his desk, he was indulging in an adulterous act that ironically saved his life. Now the question is whether to come clean to his family or seize the chance to start a new life with Abby; spineless Ben favours the latter.
LaBute's almost cruel naturalism, with the whole uninterrupted hour and forty minutes of deliberation being played out entirely in real time, gives us every nag and niggle in Ben and Abby's relationship – a relationship placed under extraordinary strain by these extraordinary circumstances. Ben whines and Abby snipes in a raging battle of the sexes, with LaBute's dialogue veering between the razor sharp and the ploddingly mundane. This is the stuff of real-life relationships, the good and the bad – though the bad is dominant here – and is rendered even more real by the excellent performances of Sean O'Neil and Janine Ingrid Ulfane.
Ben is a whining, cowardly, supremely selfish individual, a man whose first reaction to catastrophe is to improve his own life and whose initial mood of devastation is revealed to be not about the tragedy but about his own predicament. He is played by O'Neil with a wallowing self-absorption, not shying away from the repulsiveness of the character. Abby, meanwhile, portrayed with convincing inner torment and guilt by Ulfane, acts as the conscience of the piece, but even her agonising impulses of regret and self-disgust are more intimately tied up with their relationship than with the larger reality of 9/11.
Ultimately, 9/11 is never more than a backdrop to LaBute's exploration of the selfish instincts of human nature. This fact is foregrounded by director Rob Watt's respectfully judged vision of this piece, with Nik Corrall's set deliberately blocking out the outside world, which only intrudes through the clever device of a flickering television screen. What the backdrop serves to do is make the self-centred world of the protagonists even starker in comparison and jolt us all out of the delusion that catastrophes only create heroes. The Mercy Seat may not have a particularly insightful wider point to make about the events of 9/11, but it does make important, if sometimes painful, observations about the darker side of humanity.
The Mercy Seat runs at the Pleasance Theatre until 18 September.
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