Simple8’s Land of the Free at Southwark Playhouse Borough – review

The impending US election and recent alleged attempts on Donald Trump’s life lend topicality to this new offering from acclaimed theatre collective Simple8. Sebastian Armesto and Dudley Hinton’s script traces John Wilkes Booth’s journey from touring theatre actor to infamous assassin of President Abraham Lincoln to Confederate rebel, gunned down in a rural barn in 1856 while on the run, aged just 26. It’s a story that offers up plenty of opportunity for swashbuckling theatricality and invention but this turns out to be a surprisingly pedestrian couple of hours.

Neither the text nor Armesto’s staging offer up anything particularly surprising or insightful in this retelling of Booth’s treacherous tale, so I guess the main point of Land Of The Free is to see how Simple8’s characteristic mixture of rough magic, live music and imagination over resources applies to this well-worn slice of American history. As if to keep us and the multi-roling actors on our toes, the chronological order of scenes jumps around a fair bit (the pivotal assassination in Ford’s Theatre, Washington DC actually closes the first half, although it is partially re-enacted in act two) but for no clear reason: we are kept abreast of where we are by cue cards attached to the sides of Kate Bunce’s false proscenium arch set. Heavy red velvet drapes part and close to indicate scene breaks.

Even more bizarrely, a significant swathe of the second half is performed in verse, presumably a nod to Booth’s origins as a Shakespearean actor; this is the section of the story where Booth (played by Brandon Bassir as a floppy-haired misfit with a strong narcissistic streak) and his cohorts are plotting Lincoln’s demise, so the parallels with Julius Caesar, which we see the travelling family of players rehearsing at the opening of the play, are obvious. It varies the tone and pace a little, but isn’t sufficiently interesting or original to generate much real excitement.

The Civil War backdrop, and the idea that the bedrock principle of liberty upon which America is founded can mean something entirely different from one person to the next, are omnipresent, but there’s little sense of urgency or danger. It’s really more of a pageant than a play, and the sketchy characterisations and brief stage time of many of the roles unfortunately leads periodically to some pretty coarse acting. The performers spend much of the evening facing front and solemnly reciting the text at us as though reading from an autocue.

Still, Owen Oakeshott is magnificent as the self-dramatising ham of an actor-manager who also happens to be Booth’s father, and Natalie Law is pleasingly tangy and self possessed as the senator’s daughter our anti-hero falls for. Clara Onyemere invests Lincoln with real gravitas and spirit. The whole production is bathed in appealing sepia and golden tones by lighting designer Chuma Emembolu.

Ultimately though, the whole enterprise just comes across a bit too pleased with itself. It’s all well and good presenting a challenging, epic story in a bare bones staging but when there’s little innovative or striking about said staging, the show can seem rather aimless. It runs less than two hours, not including interval; it feels considerably longer.