Review: Apologia (Trafalgar Studios)

From Titus Andronicus to Festen and the collected works of Alan Ayckbourn, the drama of the disastrous dinner party has a long and distinguished pedigree in British theatre.

Alexi Kaye Campbell’s contribution to the genre was first seen at the Bush in 2009, and is now given a Rolls Royce revival at the hands of director Jamie Lloyd. It stars Stockard Channing (The West Wing, The Good Wife) as the principled but acid-tongued art historian Kristin, who is celebrating her birthday with her two sons and their respective girlfriends.

From the outset it is entirely clear that this is going to be an evening from hell. The oven isn’t cooking the chicken and faced with the news that her banker son Peter met his bright, new American girlfriend at a prayer meeting, dyed in the wool Marxist Kristin can’t decide whether being a born again Christian is worse than "raping the Third World". The other son, Simon, is in the throes of a full-fledged breakdown, something his mother viciously lays at the door of soap actress Claire whom she describes as a "gaping hole".

But things are brought to a head by the boys’ feelings about their mother’s memoir – titled Apologia– a justification of her life and times which unrepentantly fails to mention them.

As the action proceeds from evening to the following morning, in four scenes, on Soutra Gilmour‘s realistically academic kitchen set, family feuds break out. There are many good and funny one-liners, but the play persists in feeling more like a series of carefully prepared appetisers than a truly satisfying meal.

Overwritten set-piece speeches – from Kristin on the importance of Giotto in making women recognise themselves in art, from Simon on his abandonment on a station platform in Italy – alternate with dialogue which simultaneously talks too much and reveals too little.

For me, for all its skill, Apologia is a fundamentally dishonest play in the sense that the analogy it creates between Kristin’s political activism – her desire to find her voice and save the world – is not automatically antithetical to being a good mother. It is her personality – under-explored – that would cause her to make the choices she does. And after all the conflict, the resolution where she is forgiven arrives too rapidly and feels too easily won.

On the other hand, there’s no doubt that Apologia offers its well-chosen cast multiple opportunities to shine and they seize them. Joseph Millson, in a double role as the two brothers, brings pathos to the quiet scene between the battered Simon and his mother and uneasy fury to Peter’s confrontations; Desmond Barrit is characteristically witty and humane as Kristin’s gay friend.

As the daughter-in-law, Freema Agyeman (best known as Martha Jones in Doctor Who) gives the feisty Claire more nuance and emotion than the character possibly deserves, while Downton Abbey‘s Laura Carmichael is a revelation as Trudi, the natural born peacemaker, with a gift both for kindness and for putting her foot in it. Her modulation from annoying irritant to thoughtful support is beautifully managed.

Which leaves Channing, very much the star turn at the heart of things, riding her lines with a gimlet-eyed frostiness, delivering devastating put-downs with aplomb. If she can’t summon the emotional heft entirely to convince us that her character is anything more than a monster, I suspect that is more the play’s fault than hers. It’s a piece of writing than purports to be about the messiness of life, but then ties it up in a neat bow.

Apologia runs at Trafalgar Studios until 18 November.