Levelled down… The City and the Town (2023), Wilton’s Music Hall and on tour

 

Who makes the Nazis?  Bad-bias TV,  Arena badges,  BBC, George Orwell, Burmese police...  Who Makes the Nazis?

Mark E Smith, The Fall

Go see this play. It’s funny it’s tragic and it doesn’t necessarily take your side. Unlike Mr Smith it suggests that answer to the question above is rather closer to home, but only if you fully engage in Anders Lustgarten’s finely wrought argument and sparked, cultured, characters each full of our pride and violence, our hate and our complacency, our privilege and our moral decline. As its title implies The City and the Town contains opposing concepts in equal measure, extremes balanced by an equality of uncertainty and an audience increasingly aware of its own complicity. There are no easy answers and there is no solution unless we accept everyone’s right to that resolution.

In his introduction to the script, Lustgarden quotes the hot dog guy meme – a group of people standing around discussing who could have possibly driven a hot dog shaped car through a shop window with a man dressed as a hot dog… but it’s not just Boris Johnson that’s to blame, the writer is equally scathing about Keir Starmer and Labour’s speedy return to old new Labour and a centre ground that we liberal elitists crave  mostly because it’s an improvement on the blatant cruelty and deception of the right.

Categorical thinking, pattern-recognition reflexes all undermine our ability to accept complexity and responsibility and the play runs headlong into these instincts and takes the audience with it with deft humour and three fascinating personas.

Gareth Watkins and Sam Collings - production shots Karl Andre 

It’s a story of a family forced apart by circumstance and two estranged brothers who come face-to-face for the first time in thirteen years for their father’s funeral. Ben (Sam Collings) is a corporate lawyer living in Crouch End with a nice wife and children, Nathaniel and Esmerelda, playing in their big garden. He looks around his father’s wreck of a house with all the disdain of someone who things they’ve improved beyond their roots, a place at Oxford having set him on a course for conventional success: a large Peugeot and a moustache.

By contrast, brother Magnus (Gareth Watkins) has the trappings of regional working-class culture, a tattoos on his skull that he couldn’t remove even if he wanted and which literally mark him apart from the bourgeoise concepts that cloud Ben’s self-esteem. Unlike Ben, Marcus has stayed the course and, after their mother left them and then his brother went to college, he was the one who stayed loyal to their father, supporting him in his hand-to-mouth engineering business.

Father and son preferred British motor bikes of more character than reliability, Triumph and BSA, as opposed to the far too perfect Japanese models. This affection is emblematic of pride in lost British manufacturing which gradually disappeared over decades of multi-party miss-management and capitalist imperatives, taking the heart from regional towns and cities many of which have not recovered… The Red Wall, the Brexit heartlands and a hotbed of alienation all far from “levelled up”.

Sam Collings and Gareth Watkins 

All brother Ben sees is someone less successful than himself, he tries to re-establish their relationship by bringing Magnus a suit jacket, a sign that he can only really view success on his terms – he doesn’t even consider that his brother may already have a suit. Magnus, for his part, is proud of the thousands of hours he has put into crafting his body in the gym: after all you either can or can’t bench-press 200kg, there’s no pretension just the act of strength, of manhood.

The brothers keep on moving closer, bonding on shared memories, Auntie Pauline and her Christmas gifts of chocolate selections which were bartered based on their favourites, the time they re-enacted the destruction of the death star, old haunts, old girlfriends… but they always violently pull apart. Too much water has passed under the bridge and Magnus’ now feels like his father’s keeper and that Ben is both phoney and faithless.

They argue bitterly about the funeral – a cremation not a burial and with no time for a speech from Ben, and then packing books from shelves, Ben come across tomes on right wing conspiracies which Magnus insists were his fathers but we learn later were his. Ben lacks the expression to truly relate and can only throw accusations of fascism and “perform disapproval” as Magnus pushes back at his southern softie of a sibling.

Sam Collings and Amelia Donkor

Act two starts off with Ben nursing a black eye delivered, as promised, by Magnus when he tried to speak at the funeral. He is being looked after by Lyndsay (Amelia Donkor) an ex-girlfriend who he left behind like everyone else… there’s still some warmth there but Lyndsay’s decision to say mystifies Ben as if the only solution to the situation they shared lay elsewhere.

Lyndsay proves more than his equal in eloquence and her own reasons for choosing the course she has gradually become painfully clear and carry a moral force that gradually shames both brothers as we find out the truth of Magnus’ situation and Ben’s essentially selfish decisions.

Ultimately both have taken refuge where they could, Magnus in far-right politics and Ben in imply following the money. Magnus is a remarkable creation, revulsion and sympathy mixed in one character and, in the end the same is true of his brother for different reasons. It’s not enough to call each other names, we need to understand and engage, as well as paying the price… to this extent Lyndsay is the bravest of the three.

But that’s just my take, catch this play if you can.

Gareth Watkins 

IThankYou Theatre Rating: **** Astonishingly well-written and performed with total commitment, this is a warm and brutally open story of our need to be truthful, loving and forgiving. We all need to take responsibility especially those of us from Northern towns who got lucky with an Oxbridge place and never really went home…

Riksteatern’s Head of Theatre and Artistic Director Dritëro Kasapi directs with power and clarity with his players leaving everything out on the stage, even big Gareth looking drained by the end, his a fascinating potrayal of a good man gone to waste. Sam and Amelia are equally intense and this is the closest you'll get to watching a three-way fifth set tie-break in theatrical Britain.

Ace design to from Hannah Sibai with lighting by Matt Haskins. 

The City and the Town is at Wilton’s Music Hall until Saturday 25^th and then onto the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, Norwich Playhouse and then Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough before a tour of Sweden in the autumn.

Full details can be found on the play’s website.