Victory at the Arcola Theatre

Victory at the Arcola Theatre

13 March, 2009
by: Longboy

Victory, Howard Barker's surreal Restoration masterpiece revived at the Arcola, weighs the importance of personal victories against wider public achievements. Charles Stewart regains the crown but all his previous convictions about absolute monarchy must be abandoned and bankers take over the country. This is one of many hollow victories within the play, while personal triumphs are the most powerful, as witnessed in the revenge of a woman who marries and enslaves her rapist.

Barker weighs the virtues of power and physicality with those of rationality and ideology, and identifies the power of a rational mind to dominate and crush more completely than a fist.  His creation 'Theatre of Catastrophe' calls for the audience to experience moral and emotional conflict at a personal level.  This production provides no refuge or distraction – the intimacy of the theatre and the near exclusive use of simple white stage lights meant that the physicality of the characters is brought to the fore.

Geraldine James plays Bradshaw, the widow of a traitor whose memory and remains are defiled as part of the restoration.  She animates Bradshaw with enormous force and clarity – a wilful, base quality but one which also springs from vulnerability and humanity. Nicholas Rowe plays Charles I superbly.  Very watchable, he manages to display both a regal swagger and the impotence of a tiger whose claws have been clipped.  Matthew Kelly (yes that's right, him off Stars in Their Eyes) does passably as brutish cavalier Ball, but Karl Theobald aka Martin from Green Wing is superb even if type cast to a degree: partly pathetic, but also unshakably and morally correct.

The last scene of the first half concerns the original cartel of bankers and powerful men that has become such a mass preoccupation since movies as Zeitgeist and JFK.  Barker lays out the nature of this conspiracy impressively, without hysteria.  His concern here is the masks which hide the brutality of power and insulate the wearers from their deeds. The audience are left to draw their own moral conclusions but the restored King takes advantage his irrelevant status to force some unpalatable truth on them, laying bare their hypocrisy.  It is well worth seeing the play for this scene alone – one of the most dramatic moments in the play.

Victory is a fascinating and pertinent play and this is a timely and efficiently executed revival.  Great performances by the two leads are brilliantly supported by the cast, most of whom have complex balancing acts to pull off that are vital to the success of the whole.

Victory's subject matter is very weighty but there is such clear humanity in both script and production that it is leavened enough to become palatable.  There are also some moments of real humour.  I am very glad to have seen it and would recommend it to anyone who wonders about how George W Bush sleeps at night or how George Galloway can be simultaneously impressive for his most commitment to justice and activism and yet so unattractive as a human being.


Check out What's On at the Arcola Theatre
Check out London Tragedy
Check out London Theatre
Check out Things To Do in London

Longboy