A Mirror – Almeida Theatre, London

Writer: Sam Holcroft

Director: Jeremy Herrin

There is something intriguing about Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror from the moment you walk into the Almeida Theatre. The foyer is decked out in pink tuile; as you enter the auditorium you are told that the service will be two hours long, and an order of service for the marriage of Leyla and Joel is found on one’s seat.

This is all at odds with the marketing photography, which features Jonny Lee Miller in stark-coloured lighting. But then, that photo has the words THIS PLAY IS A LIE written across it, so the clues are there.

For the world we are drawn into is one in which unlicensed plays are illegal. The wedding ceremony is a front, designed to throw off any watching officials – and once they leave, the real play can begin.

That play, the “real” play, sees Miller as Čelik, a high-up apparatchik in the Ministry of Culture that oversees all theatrical works. Čelik sees himself not as a censor, but as a cultivator of artists – as long as they colour within the rigid lines determined by the state. And so, when soldier-turned-mechanic Adem (Michael Ward) submits his first attempt at a play, Čelik offers to mentor him to produce something of artistic merit that falls within the proscribed guidelines.

Čelik’s motives for doing so are murky at best, as is his relationship with Tanya Reynolds’s junior official, Mei, with whom he shares access to illicit banned plays by Shakespeare. Both Reynolds and Geoffrey Streatfeild (as Bax, a playwright who achieved success by following Čelik’s guidance) bring much-needed comedy to a play that could otherwise be unrelenting in its bleakness.

The allusions to regimes such as North Korea, where every aspect of people’s lives is heavily policed and where criticism of the state is not countenanced, are clear. But there are also nods to Western governments, including our own, who seek to exert influence on the cultural sector to more closely align with their own ideologies.

The conceit of being an illicit play surfaces from time to time, as the threats of police patrols outside cause the players to break off from their performance to recreate the wedding ceremony. Such interruptions are rare, and brief, enough to remind one of the premise without disrupting the major narrative. They’re backed up with Max Jones’s pseudo-immersive design, which converts the Almeida’s distinctively shaped stage into a traditional proscenium arch at one end of a hall where folded table tennis tables, community noticeboards and trestle tables full of wedding presents bleed into the audience spaces.

Holcroft’s work becomes a recursive piece as Adem, whose playwriting technique is a form of verbatim storytelling where he transcribes what he has heard and experienced, begins to document his experience with the ministry of culture – thus putting Čelik at risk of the authoritarian regime of which he has been a willing part. Miller gives his character an oily unctuousness that can deftly transform from a seeming air of benevolence to one of barely withheld rage within microseconds.

The risks of a piece that revels in tying itself up into Gordian knots of cleverness are twofold: that the audience may not follow what is going on, and that the play’s eventual end will not pay off all that has gone before. Holcroft and her director, Jeremy Herrin, sidestep both such pitfalls, with a finale that adds both complexity and clarity.

This play is a lie, the marketing tells us, and that much is true. But within every such lie, there are truths to be found. Uncovering them is messy, complex and difficult: but as A Mirror shows, it can also be entertaining as hell.

Continues until 23 September 2023