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Anemic re-telling of a moment of Royal historySummary
Rating
Ok
I’m generally agnostic about the royal family, including the late Diana, Princess of Wales. I don’t wish them ill, and I think they do a certain amount of good through various charities, but I don’t believe they should receive a penny of public funding, and I’d happily see their place in the national hierarchy adjusted to reflect modern sensibilities.
But I am interested in iconography and the media, and they don’t get any more iconic than Diana, with whom the media is still obsessed more than a quarter of a century after her death. The Daily Express still strives to make a headline out of her life and/or death with astonishing regularity.
Jonathan Maitland’s play The Interview focusses on Diana’s explosively revealing Panorama interview with journalist Martin Bashir in 1995, and how he persuaded her to talk to him rather than, say, Oprah – who’s disparaged as “a bit daytime”.
Bashir ingratiates himself with Diana by offering her confidences about his dead brother, and his wife having a hard time post-childbirth. He’s disingenuous and obsequious – though Matthew Flynn’s Paul Burrell runs him a close second on that front – cunning and manipulative, and doesn’t think twice (in this telling) about getting a graphic artist to forge some bank statements as leverage to secure the deal.
Bashir encourages Diana to think of him as a fellow underdog: he the working-class Pakistani kid grafting his way into a position of power at the BBC against the prevailing racism; she a privileged white woman speaking out because her husband and the in-laws haven’t treated her very well. Rousing music swells as Bashir makes this bizarre comparison, but all it roused in me was a frown of bemusement, probably because I didn’t believe a word of it.
It’s difficult to connect with characters who are as thinly sketched as these. There’s nothing bad about Tibu Fortes’ performance as Bashir, but the script gives him nothing to work with – he’s neither an out-and-out schemer nor an impassioned journalistic warrior, and this lack of either passion or nuance fatally deadens the character.
Diana fares just as poorly. Yolanda Kettle looks the part and has the Bambi body language down pat: the head tilt, the “Pity me!” pout… and she’s been fitted with a very convincing hairpiece courtesy of Wig Supervisor Pedro Paiva. From my perch up in the Circle I had ample opportunity to study it, and I can report that like Ken Branagh’s multi-layered ‘tache in his Poirot films, Diana’s hair looks authentically expensive and is immediately identifiable even in shadow. Sadly, her lines are bereft of insight or interest, as if she has no inner life at all. Perhaps I’m missing a satirical trick here, but Maitland’s approach to depicting this woman with whom half the world was fascinated seems to have been to render her as utterly bland.
The second half (which I’m told was shorter but didn’t feel it) partially restages the interview via the editing suite, during which Ciarán Owens, as Bashir’s editor, momentarily raises the play’s intensity by challenging the interviewer’s perceptions of what he’s doing. Sadly it’s just a brief interlude.
The final section of the play interprets Bashir’s fall from grace over the bank statement forgeries as a pivotal moment in the modern “post-factual” era, which I think is probably over-egging the pudding. And besides, Maitland shows us no human consequences of the events, so again why should we care?
The production is ponderously directed upon a plain rectangular carpet across which the players stroll, often in baffling slow-mo, and a curiously undulating lighting design mostly illuminates the “action”.
Those with a stronger emotional connection to the subject matter might give The Interview an extra star, but I’d challenge them to give a compelling reason why.
Nice wig – shame about the play.
Written by: Jonathan Maitland
Directed by: Michael Fentiman
Produced by: Original Theatre & Park Theatre
The Interview plays at Park Theatre until 25 November. Further information and bookings can be found here.
