Review: Alexi Kaye Campbell – Apologia

Alexi Kaye Campbell’s award winning first play Pride was far and away my favourite play of 2008. It was intelligent, funny, very well produced and moving. Apologia, his new play at the Bush Theatre, isn’t quite as impressive but is still very good.

Apologia, as one character helpfully explains, is a widely misused word which actually means ‘a formal, written defence of one’s opinions or conduct… not to be confused with an apology’. The Apologia in question is that of an eminent art historian and feminist Kristin Miller (Paoloa Dionsittia), whose recently published memoirs bear the same title. Tonight is her birthday party and her sons, who have not been mentioned in her memoirs, are due to attend. Understandably they’re not happy about being overlooked, not least as they believe she ‘abandoned’ them as children when she divorced their father and moved to Italy. Doesn’t she care?

All this sets up a rather fabulous structure for the play as lived defence – in real time, over the kitchen table ― of a book which was a theoretical defence of a life Kristin will claim was always guided by a defined principles. The play is also presumably Campbell’s own Apologia (though to make it in only his second play seems, and I think proves to be, a touch premature.

Apologia isn’t as interesting as Pride in which the ideas really emerged from characters reactions to life. Here the ideas are imposed supra mundi, although the humanist doctrine ultimately endorsed is at times a bit fuzzy.

Though Kristin is happy to condemn Margaret Thatcher as ‘a man with a vagina’ she too is not a lady keen on turning. There seems to be a contradiction between her rejection of patriarchy in favour of individual self-determination, and her naked disapproval of the selfishness she all too easily detects in others (it makes for good drama but bad philosophy). Nor do I quite buy the view that art criticism can be understood as an intrinsically moral good; an orthodoxy I thought had started to die off.

Kristin’s ‘opponents’, especially soap actress Claire (Nina Sosanya), aren’t especially sophisticated either, though they are given (unnecessarily it seems to me) much opportunity to lay out their straw defences. The less good second half of the play includes numerous set-piece speeches where the characters speak at, rather than to each other, and the narrative tension largely dissipates.

Perhaps it’s this which explains the slightly rushed delivery by most of the cast (Tom Beard’s Peter is an honourable exception). Even Paola Dionisotti, who is for the most part excellent―and stunning at the end of the play―has a tendency to sweep through many of her speeches. Sarah Goldberg’s performance as Trudi (Peter’s American- Christian fiancé) I found at first irritating but soon won me round―as indeed her character was meant to―and she was a favourite with the audience.

I’ve been perhaps a bit tough on a play which is for the most part excellent, and required viewing for anyone interested in the future of British Theatre. It is for example extremely funny.

There is a grey area, a no-man’s land, between what may be described as acceptable teasing and the kind of outright rudeness which ends conversations and starts arguments. A few recent TV comedies seem to work entirely in this zone (Peep Show and The Office are obvious examples). They are comedies not of manners, but of anxiety and though Campbell’s jokes are often more straightforward (just as his themes are more complicated) they often tap into this mood. When one character deconstructs another’s use of the word ‘hilarious’ it is both funny in its own right (where the original use was not) and deeply awkward in the relaxed social arena. For the audience it’s like being tickled into a paying closer attention.

And it’s this kind of attention to detail that raises Campbell’s work above that of his contemporaries. I’m already looking forward to what he will write next.