Theatre review: Land of the Free

simple8's return to the stage in 2024 saw them revive an old hit, and now premiere a completely new play - although I'm not sure Land of the Free will have quite as much call for revival as Moby Dick. Sebastian Armesto (also directing) and Dudley Hinton's play looks at a classic American villain, John Wilkes Booth, the first successful presidential assassin. Wilkes (Brandon Bassir) was an actor who we first meet as a teenager with his siblings, rehearsing the assassination scene from Julius Caesar behind their father's back. Junius Booth (Owen Oakeshott) was a successful Shakespearean actor who forbade his children from following him into the profession, but he was also an alcoholic and bigamist whose career, and family reputation were ruined when these secrets were exposed, somewhat undermining his authority.

So his children do in fact follow him into the theatre, but Wilkes is quickly eclipsed by his older brother Edwin's (Dan Wolff) reputation. Meanwhile Abraham Lincoln (Clara Onyemere) secures first the Republican nomination then the Presidency, on a platform that includes the belief that America's Constitution is incompatible with slavery.

This of course leads to the American Civil War, and as his stage career falters Booth becomes obsessed with Lincoln and what he sees as the deaths he's personally responsible for. Striking up a relationship with a politican's daughter (Natalie Law,) he manages to secure access to the President's box at the theatre; just as Lincoln is celebrating signs of the Union's victory, Booth fatally shoots him in the head before going on the run. I'd like to say Land of the Free imparts a bit more insight into the story than these basic facts, but unfortunately after a first act that drily, but capably enough, takes us up to the point of the assassination itself, the second jumps back in time to reveal very little more.

It's hard to see a Presidential assassin's story on stage and not think of Sondheim and Weidman's Assassins, especially as Kate Bunce's red-white-and-blue proscenium arch gets decorated with images of subsequent attacks, both successful and failed. But the show ends up feeling like a very stretched-out version of "The Ballad of Booth" from that musical: Booth was killed* before he could be captured and questioned so his grandiose statements about defending freedom are all we have of his motivations. The song variously indulges and goads him in this before eventually settling on Booth as a small and failed man trying to aggrandise what he did for little more reason than plain and simple racism.

The trouble is the play does about as much, if not less, in two hours. We find out that, contrary to his family and everyone else around him, Booth became a Confederate sympathiser during the war, joining a conspiracy to kidnap Lincoln before striking out on his own. Beyond pique at his career being overshadowed by his brother Edwin and sister Asia's (Sara Lessore) we don't get any suggestion of what led to this. History may not have a record of these details but for the sake of a coherent narrative I would have liked Armesto and Hinton to have picked a theory and run with it. The closest we get is the running theme of Julius Caesar, and the idea that his family connection to Shakespeare left him obsessed with the idea of himself as Brutus.

The structure, which takes us to the main event at the interval then rolls back, suggests we'll get more of this exploration in the second act, but instead things really start to unravel - a scene done in cod-Shakespearean blank verse and another sung entirely to the tune of "Dixie" add to an erratic feel of throwing anything at the stage to try and keep it all together. Ultimately it did feel as if the creatives themselves had also been inspired by "The Ballad of Booth" and tried to paint a bigger picture based on that - but never found the right hook to hang it on.

Land of the Free by Sebastian Armesto and Dudley Hinton is booking until the 9th of November at Southwark Playhouse Borough's Large Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: KatieC Photography.

*by a man called Boston Corbett, who'd previously castrated himself because some prostitutes once talked to him, because you can't look at an American Presidential assassination without falling into a whole Wikipedia hole of insanity†

†although still not coming close to the insanity of the Garfield assassination