Writer: Joe Penhall
Director: Matthew Warchus
Joe Penhall’s new play, The Constituent, directed by Matthew Warchus, is a star vehicle for James Corden and Anna Maxwell Martin. Most of the action takes place in a lowly constituency officer where Maxwell Martin’s Monica, an opposition backbench MP, is working alone. Corden plays Alec, an ex-serviceman, running a small security business. When the play opens, Alec is installing basic security devices in Monica’s office.
Monica is a sympathetic, decent woman, in politics to help people. She is calm, good-humoured and competent. Penhall avoids specific references to current politics, but the inevitable references to government cuts place the action squarely under Tory rule.
Corden’s engineer Alec is, at first, no more than a genial cheeky chappy, not more than slightly overstepping the mark with his friendly chat. He mentions his service in Afghanistan and seems resigned to the fact that his marriage is ending in divorce. He tells Monica that they were at the same primary school, his mother was a dinner lady there. Monica remembers her, if not him, and is warm in her responses.
Things change when Alec returns to give Monica a personal alarm. But as his story emerges there is a worrying sense that Alec is less than stable, perhaps given to wild outbursts. Might he turn violent? Why else would his wife be seeking to protect their children with a court order? For much of the rest of the play, the level of tension continues to ratchet up. Alec’s personal fury focuses on the injustices of the system – why does the law work in favour of mothers? Why is he being discriminated against as a father? The law needs to be changed, he insists.
He is highly articulate, demanding that Monica demonstrate her idealism by taking on his cause as a personal crusade. Monica tries to explain the limits of her power, genuinely distressed as she faces her limitations. She also senses the situation with Alec is getting out of hand. He keeps appearing in her office, his demands becoming rants.
All this is evident within the first part of the play. The issue for Penhall is how to sustain the tension and at the same time hit an increasingly large number of social issues. The appearance of a third character, the two-dimensional police security officer, Mellor (Zachery Hart), allows for attacks on today’s Metropolitan police and cuts in government funding to all branches of social services.
To be honest, The Constituent loses its power to grip the more issue-driven it becomes. Nothing is really going to change between the two central characters and Mellor is no more than a comic punchbag. There is no reference to the tragic murder of Jo Cox, but we can’t help wondering what sort of security measures are in place to protect an MP working in her surgery. Surely there are other people around? And more importantly, surely an ex-soldier who is being treated with anti-psychotics, will have been assessed for PTSD?
We admire Maxwell Martin’s Monica for her determination to act in good faith, share her despair when she understands how little help she can offer Alec. But our sympathies may wear thin as the play progresses: its 90-minute run time begins to feel protracted. There’s nothing sufficiently interesting in the staging to sustain our interest, the action all being played out on a traverse stage for which there seems no dramatic reason.
One of the better scenes is when the two characters are not in the same space dramatically – there’s a comic Zoom call in which Monica is furiously pedalling on an exercise bike, while Mellor woodenly reads out the official advice about maintaining personal security. The comedy here works well, but odd comic lines later in the play feel inappropriate to the serious themes. At times it feels as if the play would be better served as a shorter drama on radio.
The ending is certainly unpredictable but is disappointingly sentimental. Neither Maxwell Martin nor Corden get a real chance to shine.
Runs until 10 August 2024
