The Constituent at the Old Vic review: James Corden makes a strong return to the London stage in political drama
It’s not hard to see why James Corden might have opted to make his return to the London stage after 12 years in a topical play by Joe Penhall. The Constituent offers him the chance to flex a different set of theatrical muscles.
It’s a long way from the farce of One Man, Two Guvnors. But the surprisingly thin play squanders both its timely subject matter and the talents of the cast.
Corden plays Alec, an ex-military man now working in security, who we first meet fitting an alarm system in the constituency office of backbench opposition MP Monica (Motherland’s Anna Maxwell Martin).
When it transpires that the pair went to the same primary school, this slender connection is enough to make Alec open up to her about his domestic troubles. His wife is now living with another man, and he’s separated from his children.
He appeals to Monica for help but while she’s sympathetic, there’s a limit to what she can do. This isn’t enough for Alec, who becomes increasingly demanding of her time.
Penhall’s play attempts to navigate what it means to be a public servant in a time when MPs face both online harassment and threats of physical violence, but it skims the surface of these issues, and while there’s something to be said for the fact it does not go down the woman-in-peril road, it doesn’t offer much of substance in its place.
Director Matthew Warchus has rearranged the Old Vic so that the audience sits on either side of a narrow strip of stage, but he struggles to generate much in the way of tension, the pace further hampered by long scene changes in which desks are shifted around.
Corden does a strong job, capturing the character’s intensity and increasing desperation. He makes the most of the material. As does the always reliable Martin, who convinces in the role of a politician trying to retain her capacity for empathy while being councilled to keep people at arm's length for the sake of her safety. Her concern for the impact all this is having on her children is palpable.
While it is ostensibly concerned with the way men are shaped by the violence in their lives and it presents Corden’s ex-serviceman character in a relatively compassionate light, it does not treat its third, and flimsiest, character in the same way. Zachary Hart’s parliamentary protection officer is principally there to be the butt of jokes, to supply exposition about stab vests and to instigate the play’s one moment of physical conflict.
Penhall has a strong track record of writing taut, idea-driven plays – most notably the 2000 psychiatric drama Blue/Orange – but this is far less focused.
It touches on several potentially interesting themes, on the way men struggle to adjust to life outside the military, the mechanics of restorative justice and the particular venom faced by women in the public eye, but in the most dramatically undynamic of ways.
Old Vic, to August 10; buy tickets here
