Theatre review: Eyam

It's long been a truism that Shakespeare's Globe is a very hard place to write new plays for - Howard Brenton and Jessica Swale are the only playwrights to have succeeded there multiple times - but Michelle Terry started her tenure there well when Morgan Lloyd Malcolm's Emilia was a popular hit. Any hopes she might have helped the venue lift that curse for good are dashed by the final show in her debut season though: Matt Hartley's Plague drama Eyam suffers from many of the classic problems that afflict new writing here. In 1665, with England still feeling the aftereffects of the Civil War, shit vicar William Mompesson (Sam Crane) and his wife Katherine (Priyanga Burford) are sent to the Derbyshire village of Eyam, not being told that the reason they need a new minister is because the villagers lynched the last one. This is a place divided by the wealthy Phillip Sheldon's (Adrian Bower) attempts to claim the common land as his own OH GOD NOT A PLAY ABOUT THE LAND ENCLOSURES ACT, ABORT, ABORT!

Dozens of characters are thrown at the stage along with all their history of major grudges and petty squabbling for the first hour; but none of this matters because Sheldon's wife Elizabeth (Zora Bishop) wants a new dress - and the material's coming from London, where the Plague is rife.

The plague comes along with the material, and where Hartley has been teasing a gay relationship between tailor George Viccars (Jordan Metcalfe) and his landlady's sheltered son Edward (Luke MacGregor) this turns out to be a red herring, their work on the dress making them the first of 277 victims. Katherine dissuades William from his initial instinct to flee, and instead gets him to institute a quarantine - the remote village isolating itself in the knowledge that this could be catastrophic for them, but will stop the disease from spreading. As the villagers drop like flies, they still can't give up their existing feuds, and a new one begins as William clashes with the previously banished puritan minister Rev Stanley (Annette Badland.)

Prayer is of course the villagers' main attempt to defend themselves, and is even considered to be working when they pray for cold weather and it comes. In January. In Derbyshire. Eyam comes in at a full three hours, much of which is badly misjudged. It takes almost the entire first act for the characters to start dying, and while this is clearly intended to make us care about them before we lose them it backfires: Far too much of the play consists of all the characters shouting at each other at the same time, and with almost everyone dressed identically and playing multiple characters, the effect is of a mass of unlikeable people (such a uniform mass that at the interval Phill hadn't realised there was any cast doubling going on,) who are all angry with each other but the specifics of it all are lost.

Perhaps if we didn't know the Plague was coming the effect might have been different, but even if the publicity hadn't clearly stated this was the theme, the chorus of "crows" in black hoods and plague masks stalking Adele Thomas' production would have been a giveaway. We end up waiting impatiently for the bodies to start piling up, if only to thin out the noise. At least the nudity warning turns out to be aFULL-FRONTAL MALE NUDITY ALERT!from Luke MacGregor, although under the circumstances you're unlikely to find it too sexy unless you've got a thing for buboes. This is a play that deals in darkness, but it does get some laughs, mainly the unintended kind, like when the cast wander around the stage singing "die, pussy, die!" for reasons best known to them.

Not only had the audience thinned out after the interval, people continued leaving through the second act, which ends with another misjudgement as Crane, whose character is one of a handful to survive, pays tribute to the dead by reciting their names - that's all TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY SEVEN names. The intention is clearly to honour their sacrifice, but that's something the preceding three hours should have done - instead the play's mainly shown them resisting the quarantine at every step, only going through with it because of the sway their religious leaders have. Trying to make up for that with a quarter-hour recital of names, staged as some kind of endurance test for Crane, aims for a bold statement of respect but ends up feeling like a cheap (and time-consuming) stab at the audience's emotions. Sirine Saba's unibrow is quite something to behold, though.

Eyam by Matt Hartley is booking in repertory until the 13th of October at Shakespeare's Globe.

Running time: 3 hours including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.