Review: For the Sake of Argument (Admission Productions)

We're all fairly comfortable with the knowledge that our actions have consequences. But how often do we apply the same to our words? Certainly in our interpersonal relationships - whether romantic, familial, professional etc. - we are generally sure to mind our manners; anything less risks the fragile social harmony of an open-plan office space, or a tipsy Boxing Day. 

But what about in the political sphere, and the impact our voiced and written thoughts may have on people we may never meet? Especially when those words aren't meant to bully or cause harm, but are simply the expression of sincere moral conscience? Actually it's something the UK plc office has been dealing with rather a lot lately: perhaps it's not the most sensitive example, but it's usually forgotten that a now notorious comparison of niqab-wearers to letterboxes was part of a defence of the very right to wear such things, and thus doubly belonging to a very British liberal tradition of sticking up for the freedom to practice the dafter elements of one's religion while maintaining the equally crucial freedom to make fun of them. 

I don't think an anticipated spike in postal service-inspired hate crime transpired in the wake of that column (now I think of it, surely the association of Muslim women with our beloved red pillars could only be a compliment in the land of Royal Mail and Postman Pat?) but I could be wrong. In fact, that the turbulent scribbler who penned the offending work is now our Prime Minister is wholly related to why For the Sake of Argument has been written, directed and produced by Harry Darell at the fascinating and highly appropriate venue of Bridewell Theatre, off Fleet Street. A tasteful note from Darell in the (free) programme includes the country being "in its most divided period since the 2003 invasion" among his reasons for why this story is being told now. 

       

                                                                                                       The programme (it's free) 

That story surrounds Eleanor Hickock (Ashleigh Cole), a brilliant (her name deriving from the Greek 'Helene' meaning "bright, shining one") journalist and polemicist, who has made her continued defence of the Anglo-American-led action against Saddam's regime the central pole of her career, and a point of intellectual pride. In fact, it's worse than that; like her hero, Tony Blair, she really believes it. Her intransigence drives her usually pretentious friends into an earnest frustration, and a routine pub-based debating session to an explosively abrupt end. This gut reaction to her cerebral volley fire - the blowback to her shock and awe - foreshadows a much darker unintended consequence in the second half. 

As the debate winds up prematurely, Eleanor is approached by Maria Bradley (Paula Cassina), a gently spoken stranger with sadness in her eyes who invites the writer to dinner at her home. A confused and suspicious Eleanor demands to know why, and learns that Maria's son Mark was killed after joining the Army to serve in Iraq, having singled out her writings as his foremost inspiration. Cassina's dignified quietness obliterates the flippant mayhem of the earlier part of the scene, and captures that wall of stoicism constantly fending off the assault of tears that only a bereaved parent need build. Meanwhile, her Latin vowels complement her character's attachment to prayer, and we get every sense of a believing Catholicism, urging her on through the loss of her beloved child and toward this act of reconciliation. (The ensemble is notably well cast.) While adoring her salutations of the Parthenon and Orwell, and indictment of the Clintons, Maria confesses to struggling with Eleanor's "anti-theistic works". (A less well-fitting origin theory of ‘Eleanor’ is the Hebrew one, "candle of God"). 

The embracing clemency of the mother is matched in impact by the still, seething resentment of the father (Matt Weyland), and the truly tempestuous intervention of the brother (Harry Farmer), who veers terrifyingly from a version of hospitality to a volcanic rage. His stabs at meeting Eleanor on the intellectual plane - not helped by her aloofness - are short-lived as his emotions take over. Both actors in their ways portray an agonised, masculine grief very powerfully. 

But Cole is the stand-out performance. We follow her retreat from the hyper-articulate, impassioned warrior of the word to a sobbing, animal fear, as she finds herself in an arena where her verbal prowess is of no use. This is much how assumptions that our enlightened democratic values would help pacify a defeated Iraq failed to account for cultural and regional complexities, as well as details deep in the human psyche. There are more things in Heaven and Earth than dreamt of in Eleanor's philosophy. 

The production benefits from Darell's clear direction, and Amy Watts’ intriguing set design choice of covering the stage in a tankload of sand haunts the proceedings. It apparently plays the role of albatross to the obsessive Eleanor, whose suede boots are lightly coated in the stuff when she jumps on the pub table to extol - yet again - the virtues of '2003'. There is delightful comic relief provided by the failing landlord (Greg Snowden) and starstruck Irish cleaner Liz (Ella May). May, for this writer, only once let slip that she isn't a native speaker, by a rogue "agend-er" (a common error by English actors assuming a rhotic accent) But she proves astute at pathos as well as humour when her attempts to join the thrill of the debate are rebuffed. 

If there is a problem with the play for me it is in its implications. It draws no moral distinction between a commentator's right to argue for an assertive foreign policy and incitement to terrorism. The portrayal of the late Mark Bradley (Georgie Farmer; yes brothers playing brothers) is the starkest example of this. He appears in three monologue scenes; one as a bantering Jack-the-lad in uniform, another possessing the quality of a teenage incel in a darkened bedroom, and a third, out on active duty, sounding every inch the foaming, egomaniacal white saviour. Most problematically, Farmer's performance is excellent, particularly in the latter two incarnations. I later discover that his speeches are verbatim theatre, lifted from the blog of US 2nd Lt. Mark Daily who died in Iraq citing a little known radical writer named Christopher Hitchens (no prizes for guessing that one). Lots can be justified for the sake of art, and I don't doubt this can, but for me cherry-picking passages from an honourable servant of an ally's armed forces and dressing them up like they belong to the love child of bin Laden and Anders Breivik comes with a large moral health warning.  

Not that we weren't warned: that otherwise reasonable author's note from Darell states that Eleanor's language "has the impact of radicalisation". In the play, it certainly does, albeit with a number of other factors swirling round in a nightmare cocktail. But when you clock that Hicock is Hitchens and Mark Bradley Mark Daily, it is a bump back to reality. Would a journalist whose whole corpus is an ode to Enlightenment rationalism really inspire radicalisation? And however mentally precarious the recruit, is radicalisation really a fair description of a decision to join the Army, constrained as it is by the Geneva Convention and myriad other laws, codes and disciplines? And when the khaki boomerang comes flying back at Eleanor, it all seems a bit close to those victim-blaming arguments fashionable among the Noughties ‘Stop the War’ crowd.

But the way Eleanor refuses to let go of the argument does provide a useful reminder to us all: even the most rational among us have need of faith, and to live within an overarching narrative. When that faith masquerades as pure reason it is perhaps at its most dangerous, if only in its tendency to provoke those who shun reason altogether into destructive fury. Perhaps that's why David Hume - an atheist who knew that "reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions" - cheekily gatecrashes the Hicock/Hitchens body of work. If we ever think reason is in charge, we are fooling ourselves, often with fatal consequences. If we really were to milk the metaphor, we could remember that the man at the nucleus of Operation Telic had not yet publicly declared his faith, just as Eleanor is seemingly unconscious of the constant trumping of reason by passion in her every "action of the will".                                                    

                                                      

No room for Hume?

But For the Sake of Argument is valuable for its attempt to bring both faith and reason to the table, for dialogue and light to transcend argument and heat. And a chastened Eleanor herself becomes an unlikely ambassador for the ghostly legacy of Christianity and its perennial concern for the downtrodden, as she pays attention to the rejected Liz. Perhaps she is that candle of God after all.