Riflemind at the Trafalgar Studios

Riflemind at the Trafalgar Studios

24 September, 2008
by: Joe Harrod

Pissing in the fridge is pretty rock'n'roll behaviour. But not if you're a forty-something yoga obsessive hammered after a few spritzers and driven potty by an empty life. Then, it's just sad.

There's heartfelt applause from audience and hardened hacks alike at the close of this curious show at the Trafalgar Studios. We're applauding a set of stellar performances, a slick production and a script by Andrew Upton that is intelligent, naturalistic and compelling. However, there's also a tangible sense of relief that it's all over.

Riflemind is about a rock band who split more than 15 years ago, meeting up to consider the prospect of touring again. And it's about so much more than that: growing old, dreaming of better days, looking for meaning in life and craving proper relationships. And drug addiction. The play takes a brutally honest but compassionate look at a group of compulsive characters whose addictions are stronger than their selves. They are defined by their strengths and weaknesses and cannot escape. The moral messages of the play are brilliantly both ambiguous, and watertight. Airtight.

These issues are laid bare in a series of utterly convincing conversations. The problem is that, were you to be staying in this particular country house and find yourself a participant in any of these self-involved, inflamed arguments, you would be both embarrassed and bored. You'd go to the pub, an understandable reflex obeyed by several of the characters.

In a sense Riflemind is a challenge, a piece that can only work in a theatre. One would never listen to these characters banging on about themselves and one quite seriously doesn't want to – however in the end, it's a revealing and emotional experience. All human life, ambition, frailty and need are here laid bare. But it isn't half boring.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, a Hollywood heavyweight but also an experienced art-house director at the Labyrinth in New York, directs the show with zip. Despite several dull conversations the production moves with realism and great pace. It carries the audience along, helped by brilliant performances in every role. John Hannah is particularly fine as the moody former frontman who's initiated the whole weekend but remains ambivalent about the past, when he was effectively a Rock God. The cast shines and there are even some likable characters. There are moments of brilliant comedy, a bravura sex scene, photo-realistic drug-addled chat and loud rock. It's a show that works in spite of a serious central problem. Faded rockers, fattening agents and tenuously recovering junkies are not fun to be around.

There isn't a moment in Riflemind that's less than convincing. Even under-explored family relationships within the band and a sex-for-success sub-plot are realistic. You might wish that Upton had pursued these further but you can see why he didn't. He's trapped his audience, but the players are the ones who are really stuck. From addictions that outweigh and even outshine the flatness of everyday sobriety, to the impossibility of retracing footsteps that changed the world, this is a collage of old age, loneliness and not a little despair. If youth offered freedom and power, the autumn years are a shadowed dream. Perhaps we shouldn't be so jealous of the Stones after all.

If you see Riflemind you won't leave at half time. You'll be compelled to linger and rewarded at the close by insight to some very fundamental quandaries facing anyone who's going to fade away rather than burning out. You'll be glad you've gone but you won't thank us for recommending it. Perhaps instead we can encapsulate the message about reality with our lead singer's response to the hallucinatory self-centred ramblings of his wife:

"You're fine. You went out, had a few drinks, and you dreamed that you were free."


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Joe Harrod