Theatre review: Shipwreck

Now a regular name at the Almeida, American playwright Anne Washburn’s previous plays there Mr Burns and The Twilight Zone (about to get a West End transfer) have taken well-known popular fiction and refashioned it into something different; the former in particular explored the blurring lines between made-up stories and what we believe is true, so it makes an inevitable kind of sense that Washburn would be at the front of the line of playwrights to tackle Donald Trump, whose reality is made up of confidently-asserted fictions. She does this in typically sideways fashion in Shipwreck by looking at the guilt and panic of a group of upper middle-class liberals wondering if there was more they could have done to prevent Trump’s election and the worst of what he did once in office. The Trump presidency always offers up new topics of conversation but in this instance the latest is former FBI director James Comey’s revelations about a private dinner between the two of them.

In 2017, with that still dominating the news cycle, Jools (Raquel Cassidy) and Richard (Risteárd Cooper) invite a group of their friends for a weekend at their new holiday home, a remote former farmhouse in an unspecified part of the country.

Seemingly unable to make small talk their conversation always keeps coming back to Trump and how his ascent could have happened; when they get snowed in with limited supplies their discussion turns more heated and desperate: Allie (Justine Mitchell) accuses the others of not responding enough to her Facebook posts which honestly could have made a difference, before they start to take into serious consideration whether Trump is the literal Antichrist. Apart from the extremes their conversation takes them to this is largely a naturalistic few hours of conversation, and although I still don’t love Washburn’s dialogue (it can get realistic to the point of being waffle) it’s generally watchable. But given this is the writer of Mr Burns, I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop and a surreal new dimension to be revealed.

This is there, but not to the extent I expected. There are two other strands to the story, as the group’s vague musing on a theoretical black American comes to life with Mark (Fisayo Akinade,) a Kenyan orphan adopted in the 1970s by a white American couple, and the only black person in his community. So he’s an African-American, literally, but his background doesn’t have the generations of slavery associated with that term, and his speeches see him try to connect with that history by trying to imagine himself having come from Africa a couple of centuries earlier; in some memorable monologues from Akinade he puts himself in the shoes of a slave and tries to comprehend the incomprehensible.

The final strand sees each of the acts end with Trump himself, not as he is but as his self-mythology paints him. First by calling back to a lesser-known campaign trail lie, when Trump (Elliot Cowan) confronts George W. Bush (Akinade) over the Iraq War, culminating in man-on-man mortal combat; later by re-enacting his dinner with Comey (Khalid Abdalla,) Trump now a cross between a movie gangster and a literal golden god (costumes by Fly Davis,) who demands his fealty. It’s a touch of the demented that, to be honest, I could have done with more of, and given the way Washburn’s plays have pulled the rug out in the past, I thought the wordy first act was elaborate setup for a surreal climax – the first fantasy sequence before the interval seems to suggest this, possibly to stop people from leaving at the interval (but some still did.)

Instead the wordiness is the point, and we return to it for most of the second act. There are some implausibilities that I found distracting as well: Jools and Richard failing to make sure their house had any supplies before inviting all their friends over in a snowstorm is perhaps meant as a metaphor for liberals failing to spot the danger of Trump, but it does end up making the entire group look too stupid to take their arguments seriously. The revelation that Yusuf (Abdalla) and Andrew (Adam James) are not only rich but members of the 1% also seems like a leap for their friends not to have even had an inkling. But Rupert Goold’s production has a classy cast (I’d been watching The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel on the way into the theatre, which made it quite uncanny how much Tara Fitzgerald looks and sounds like Alex Borstein when transforming herself into Mark’s adoptive mother) that keep the circular dialogue-heavy script moving.

There’s also strong design as Miriam Buether provides a huge round wooden table as the stage, with the actors and some of the audience seated around it as if at a meeting of a secret society, something which is overtly referenced near the end. Luke Halls’ video design also projects grotesque parodies of religious imagery onto the back wall, highlighting the way the friends’ conversation leads to them seeing Trump increasingly as the head of some shadowy supernatural cabal. But for all the interesting parts there isn’t the feeling of them adding up to a whole – Akinade’s strand is finally linked to the others in terms of the story, but thematically it still seems like it comes from a different play. And the surreal interludes provide relief from all the arguing rather than seeming an organic part of the overall picture. Not quite as Marmite as Mr Burns, Shipwreck isn’t quite as coherent either.

Shipwreck by Anne Washburn is booking until the 30th of March at the Almeida Theatre.

Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.