by Peter Flannery
Director Sean Holmes
Designer Anthony Lamble
Lighting Paul Anderson
Sound Fergus O’Hare
When :Until April 10
Production:Oxford Stage Company at the Tricycle
http://www.oxfordstage.co.uk/
The Tricycle Theatre
269 Kilburn High Road
London
NW6 7JR
www.tricycle.co.uk
When Peter Flannery's Singer received its RSC premiere in 1989, I was almost alone in giving it a hostile reception, and there are aspects of the play, now being revived by the Oxford Stage Company, that still strike me as being both glib and repellent.
However, encountering it again after 15 years, I also found myself warming to its sheer vitality and ambition. In an age when theatrical minimalism is the fashion, it is a pleasure to encounter an epic five-act drama that comes over like an updated version of both Jacobean city comedy and revenge tragedy.
There is something almost cartoon-like in the piece's energy, something truly audacious in Flannery's mingling of low comedy and high seriousness. The piece also offers a terrific opportunity for the actor playing the title role, first taken by Antony Sher and now seized with relish by the great and criminally underrated Ron Cook.
We first encounter Peter Singer as a Polish Jew in Auschwitz, who manages to save his life through guile and skilful trading on the black market, though survival comes at a terrible price for both himself and his fellow inmates.
We next discover him as an immigrant in post-war Britain, wheeling and dealing as ever, and establishing himself as a slum landlord racketeer closely modelled on Peter Rachman.
Demonised by the press, he does a Stonehouse-style disappearing act, then reappears as a Profumo-like figure, seeking redemption through charitable works, in his case doling out soup and sympathy to the homeless.
By the end of a play spanning more than 40 years, Singer has been embraced by the ruling Tory party as a heroic early exemplar of ruthless market values.
Flannery's suggestion that there is a moral equivalence between Thatcherism and the Holocaust seems to me to be nothing short of obscene. In the dramatist's paranoid fantasy, Singer is offered the chance to run "camps" on British sink housing estates for immigrants and the mentally disturbed, where troublemakers would be taken out to the green fields of Surrey and "given a bloody good hiding". Needless to say, there would also be fat profits to be made from the scheme.
This dramatic proposition seriously disfigures the play. If Flannery can't distinguish between Thatcherism and the Holocaust, he seems to me to have forfeited the right to be taken seriously on the subject, but elsewhere the sheer verve of the writing carries almost all before it.
There are choruses that parody the Shakespeare of Henry V, dramatic juxtapositions in which terrible suffering is followed by low-life farce, sexual high jinks, and hilarious satire on the swinging '60s.
And, throughout, the play poses resonant questions. Should Holocaust victims attempt to forget the past, or must it always be remembered in order to avoid its repetition? Can revenge ever be justified?
Cook's spellbinding performance as Singer holds the whole sprawling drama together. He is wonderfully funny in the sly, ferrety verve of his business dealings, suddenly chilling in his heartless villainy.
But he also captures the character's haunting sense of pain, the nightmares and survivor's guilt, the sudden feeling, instilled in the camp, that he is worthless.
The agonising scene in which he finally confronts the Auschwitz guard who so cruelly tormented him is unforgettable in its emotional intensity. And John Light and Edward Peel are equally fine as his deeply damaged fellow survivors.
Sean Holmes's gripping, fast-paced production captures all the vitality of the piece, with a supporting cast of 10 playing more than 40 roles between them with panache.
In the final analysis, Flannery's Thatcher-bashing lack of proportion both dates and diminishes the play, but there are many scenes when Singer comes tantalisingly close to the status of neglected modern classic.
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