All Good Men / Thermidor
Trevor Griffiths’ All Good Men originally appeared as a BBC Play
for Today in 1974 with a stage production at the Young
Vic staged the following year.
It is
presented at the Finborough with Thermidor, another of Griffiths’
short plays, as an opener. We are in Moscow in 1937 and Anya (Sophie
Steer) has been called to the party headquarters because she was once
acquainted with people who have since been deemed to be “enemies” of the
state. In the course of the interrogation, it becomes clear that Anya
is now also considered a traitor thanks to this casual
acquaintance.
All Good Men is set in Surrey in 1974. Edward Waite,
a former miner, union leader and Labour MP is up for a knighthood and
preparing to be interviewed by a keen young television producer for a
documentary about his life. Did he sell out the workers during the
General Strike (as his ultra-socialist son William believes) or was he a
pragmatic left-wing politician doing what he thought was right to
improve people’s lives?
The parallels between the accusations of betrayal made in each play are stark and effective, adding an additional layer of world history to the already
substantial All Good Men.
David Weston brings an avuncular but authoritative air to Waite, while
Ben Deery‘s TV producer Massingham is both charmingly enthusiastic and
untrustworthy.
In the Thermidor two-hander Ben Whybrow
as the functionary Yukhov lacks the developing sense of menace that
needs to accompany his matter-of-fact words as he slowly condemns Anya
and it is left to Sophie Steer to ramp up the feeling of threat. Steer
does this in spades in a wonderfully spare, nervy and nuanced
performance as Anya realises that the call to the party HQ was to
effect her arrest, not simply to investigate her past.
Whybrow fares
better in All Good Men in the role of Edward’s son castigating his
father for what he sees as a betrayal of the working class. But in spite of taut direction by Rania Jumaily some of William’s speeches in
particular feel over-long and his socialist rhetoric more of an anvil than a scalpel.
But All Good Men remains an interesting and
thought-provoking piece and worthy of its current revival.
— Carole Gordon
