The Tricycle is in some ways an oddity among London's off-west-end theatres. Sometimes it operates like an out-of-centre regional theatre, hosting touring production - a bit like the Richmond Theatre, but with an edgier selection ('Midsummer', Filter's 'Twelfth Night', and in a few months the latest in the Ayckbourn oeuvre) and sometimes a starrier cast (Anthony Sher in Miller's 'Broken Glass').
However, its main claim to fame is quite different - its short-play seasons on up-to-the-minute topics, usually also including verbatim material (for the non-theatrical among my readers, basically transcripts of interviews with real people, read by actors - google David Hare and 'The Permanent Way'). I'm a bit of a latecomer to that kind of theatre - I sympathise with their left-of-centre-right-of-Marx aims, but am a bit sensitive to being bashed over the head with a point of view. I went to their noted 'The Great Game' season on Afghanistan a year or two back - and now most of the cast from that season have returned to do 'First Blast' and 'Second Blast', on the past and present of nuclear proliferation.
Ever the contrarian, I've ended up seeing Second Blast first and - as is often the case with this type of theatre - the texts were a bit of a mixed bag. 'There Was A Man, There Was No Man' did not quite establish its protagonists' situation and mixed loyalties strongly enough at the outset, whilst giving both mothers in the piece two children felt slightly like a symmetry too far. The two-scene 'Axis' provided a little light-relief - and also a rare diversion away from the main Iranian theme of the evening. The first scene drew knowing laughs as two Americans groped for a catchier phrase than 'Axis of Hatred' a few months after 9/11 - the second saw two North Korean generals arguing about US aid as they became locked in ever-more-absurd parade-ground goose-stepping.
'Talk Talk Fight Fight' returned us to the Iranian problem, preaching to the choir once or twice too often and playing on stereotypes of the gung-ho USA and the post-imperial-dithering UK to get a laugh from its expected Guardian-reading-north-London audience. (I'm a Guardian-reading-south-Londoner, which I hope gives me some impunity to make that gag.) It also invoked Heisenberg and Schrodinger's Cat, drawing a comparison with Michael Frayn's 'Copenhagen' which it couldn't quite live up to - not that that is comparing like with like, of course. However, it had some strengths and used an eloquent and sardonic pro-opposition Iranian nuclear scientist character to good effect.
After the interval came David Grieg's 'The Letter of Last Resort', showing a fictional PM trying to write the very-British letter which a Trident submarine commander would read after Armageddon and arguing her way through it with a civil servant. Although a little too in love with its own rhetoric at times, this play was the strongest piece of the evening, going from Radio 4, the Archers and Pirandello to a reference to the odd beauty of a warship (or, in this case, submarine) leaving harbour even to someone of a left-leaning anti-war persuasion - a reference that struck a chord with me, after many family holidays on the western shore of Portsmouth naval base. The set ended with a strange and oddly underpowered coda, 'From Elsewhere: On The Watch', another two-hander, this time among nuclear-weapons inspectors.
On the whole, some more variety of issue would have been welcome - though each of the looks at Iran found something new to say and though North Korea got a look in and Israel and Pakistan a mention, the set very much concentrates on Iran and assumes that First Blast has already covered other nuclear-weapons states. Grieg's work in some ways felt out of place in its focus on the use rather than the acquisition of nuclear weapons - a difference noted in the work itself and its recognition that the Cold War missiles-crossing-in-the-air scenario is perhaps outdated.
The evening also gave a side-angle on colour-blind casting - two of the three Korean generals were white or Middle Eastern, whilst one of the negotiators in 'Talk Talk' seemed unable to move out of an Arabic accent when playing a non-Arabic character. Yet all this engendered a good repertory cast of actors confident in each other and the texts, continuing the good work of 'The Great Game'. So, all in all, produced a thought-provoking evening - now where did I leave my copy of the book of 'The War Game'?
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