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There’s a wedding going on in Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror (first seen at the Almeida Theatre last summer). Or so it seems at first. The theatre bar is festooned with flowers, the audience is ushered in by smiling officials, the groom hovers nervously, fiddling with his jacket buttons.
But it soon turns out that his edginess is about far more than wedding-day jitters. This ceremony is in fact a front for an underground performance of a play. In that drama, we watch a government censor, Čelik, try to mould Adem, a gifted novice playwright, into a propaganda merchant. If he resists, Adem goes to be “re-educated”; if he conforms, he traduces both his talent and the truth. Given the nervousness of the stage crew, the inflammatory nature of the material and the elaborate wedding subterfuge, we quickly realise that we ourselves are playing the part of an audience in an unnamed police state.
Holcroft stacks plays within plays within plays, creating a multi-layered drama about censorship and performance in a totalitarian society. Truth and fiction reflect one another as if in a hall of mirrors. It’s ingenious and often very funny, as the cast play with levels of reality. One of the ironies is that the characters’ improvised presentation of a glorified battle scene, using a mop and coat hanger as weapons, celebrates the inventiveness of theatre even as it demonstrates its abuse as propaganda. Another is that it becomes clear that a convincing performance can be key to survival in life as well as onstage: it’s never quite clear what Mei, Čelik’s assistant, really thinks.
It gets a bit too convoluted as Holcroft spins out to explore the role of theatre more generally. But a chilling final twist reminds us that, while we might be enjoying the metatheatrical puzzle, in a dictatorship these games would be deadly serious.
In Jeremy Herrin’s gripping, thriller-like production, the cast shift gears with speed and skill. As Čelik, Jonny Lee Miller excels as a man who has convinced himself he is a force for good; Geoffrey Streatfeild oozes condescension as the government’s pet playwright; and there are great performances from Tanya Reynolds (Mei) and Samuel Adewunmi (Adem) as decent people struggling to find a foothold in this slippery territory. Enjoyably, this West End transfer finds itself just yards from the UK’s own seat of government.
★★★★☆
To April 20, almeida.co.uk
