Theatre review: The Prisoner

Some creatives are rightly lauded for revolutionising their fields but, if they stay in their job long enough, almost inevitably go from the person creating theatre's future to a relic of its past. For most of my theatregoing life the legendary Peter Brook has been based in Paris, so I've only seen the odd example of his later work. I have no doubt his status in the theatre world is justified, but works like The Prisoner can't help but make me feel they're getting staged because of that status and not their own merits. Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne write and direct the short (but still very slow) fable of a man sitting outside a prison, technically able to walk away at any time but evidently trapped there by something more powerful than walls.

The blurb suggests this is a mystery to be unraveled but in fact, apart from an introduction by a Western Visitor (Donald Sumpter) intrigued by the tale, it's told straight away in pretty linear fashion.

And a pretty grim story it turns out to be - in fact maybe the Dorfman should have had warning notes up that the play contains references to incest that might upset people - as it begins with Mavuso (Hiran Abeysekera) killing his father when we walks in on him fucking his sister Nadia (Kalieaswari Srinivasan.) Which seems pretty extenuating and makes you sympathise with Mavuso, until it becomes apparent the reason he got so murderously angry was that he wanted to fuck his sister and was jealous. He's sentenced to twenty years in prison, but his uncle Ezekiel (Hervé Goffings) gets the judge to replace this with the cruel and unusual alternative of waiting out his sentence on a hill outside the prison, foraging for food and being kept in place by guilt alone.

Brook and Estienne's style is minimalist to a fault, with the actors providing sound effects from backstage, and I knew I was going to have a problem from the start when the Visitor describes his journey through an unnamed country, Goffings and Omar Silva providing caricatures of an old man and a dwarf I found vaguely patronising. The cast is international but there's a strong suggestion of Africa: With the text attributed to Brook and Estienne I don't know if this is based on an existing fable or made up by them, and they haven't made it quite clear which culture it is they're appropriating.

In this perfect storm of pretentiousness, cultural appropriation, tedium, creepiness and cod-philosophy, nothing irritated me more than the character of Uncle Ezekiel, an utter fucknuckle who, when he's not spouting soundbites that are meant to sound wise but mean nothing, is turning up at regular intervals to inform his nephew that after crippling him / putting him in prison / making him starve on a hill for twenty years, now his actual punishment can finally begin. He's got a smug answer for everything, except the question about why he didn't do anything about his brother and niece's incestuous relationship, which it turns out he knew about, but just shrugged and waited to see if anything violent happened so he could be judgemental about it. I have no clue what The Prisoner is meant to offer, other than 75 minutes that feel so much longer.

The Prisoner by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne is booking until the 4th of October at the National Theatre's Dorfman.

Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Ryan Buchanan.