Pressure, Ambassadors Theatre, London, review: A tense, funny and moving play – about weather forecasting
★★★★☆
It's not often that you find a weather forecaster taking up the central position in a piece of drama. Off the top of my head, I can think of two movies, one of them turned into a stage musical. But the Bill Murray character in Groundhog Day is a jaded jerk who looks down on his job, and TV weather reporting is just a rung on the ladder in her implacable ambition to become the next Barbara Walters for Nicole Kidman in To Die For.
David Haig has had the inspired idea of focussing on the weather forecast of all time in Pressure, a play that has finally and deservedly reached the West End after runs in Edinburgh, Chichester, and the Park Theatre.
It is Friday, June 2 1944. D-Day is scheduled for Monday 5 June. The sun is blazing; the massed troops are waiting for the Normandy landings that will constitute the biggest amphibious military operation in history. Should General Eisenhower give the go-ahead? Gloomy Scottish meteorologist James Stagg is uncertain.
There's high pressure off the Azores and low pressure in the Atlantic. Phenomenal pressure is building in the small, under-equipped room in Portsmouth where the weather expert has to decide which front will reach the Channel first.
The author gives a superb performance as Stagg in all his driven intensity (you can almost hear an ulcer forming). He seems a curt, borderline-rude boffin at the outset but you increasingly warm to him because of the courage and tenacity with which he stands up to Eisenhower and Krick, his brash U.S. counterpart (Philip Cairns).
The Americans don't sufficiently appreciate the extraordinary fickleness of the English weather. His rival is used to prognosticating in more stable climates such as North Africa and Beverley Hills where he gave David Selznick advice on the best days for filming the Burning of Atlanta sequence in Gone With the Wind. The volatility of the weather conditions round these isles has sharpened Stagg's science and his instincts; he knows that you have to think three-dimensionally, taking into account the fluctuations in the upper atmosphere.
John Dove's production is tense and funny and very moving – qualities that Haig''s script combines with great skill. It does not feel in the least a case of overloading things that he puts Stagg under a simultaneous terrible strain: his pregnant wife has been taken into hospital because of dangerously high blood pressure. He can't make any direct contact with her or her doctors because of the extreme security surrounding Operation Overload.
As an actor, Haig has always excelled at figures struggling with the bonkers duress of farce. Here, he draws on that ability and expertly darkens it. The stakes are so momentous that it's awe-inspiring and faintly absurd at the same time.
What would be the consequences of postponement to the morale of the men and the breathless secrecy of the project? How do you weigh the lives that might be lost in the landing against the unimaginably greater number that might be saved by going ahead? There's real depth to the play because it accommodates contradiction.
Malcolm Sinclair is excellent as a blazing-eyed gung-ho Eisenhower who is also deeply sensitive to the lonely, appalling responsibilities of his command. Laura Rogers marvellously conveys the common sense, emotional intelligence and stoically shouldered hurt of the English Lieutenant who has been the married Eisenhower's chauffeur, confidante – and clandestine lover – through the war years. She couldn't be more diligent, but for her this “beginning of the end” can't help but be bittersweet.
Strong, richly satisfying play; short run. Outlook: fair to rosy.
Until 1 September (ambassadorstheatre.co.uk)
