STAGE
Nation
Olivier, National Theatre
3/5
IN A NUTSHELL
In Mark Ravenhill's action-packed adaptation of Terry Pratchett's novel two teenagers meet on a storm-ravaged island and must learn to survive.
REVIEW
I checked my watch. It was still going on. It had been going on for a considerable while and would be, according to the box office, continuing to go on long after my watch had drizzled Dali-style over my wrist through sheer fatigue.
The boy in the row in front checked his Transformers timepiece. His mother then checked anxiously on the boy and asked him for the fifth time if he was having a good time and he probably was.
Only... only there comes a time when a good time overstays its time and the boy was looking at his wristwatch and eking out his Wispa bar, fearing he may need to pace his sugar intake to see him through to the end.
There is nothing wrong with Nation. Well, there is, but we'll come to that. But there's nothing hang-your-hat-on-a-disaster, holed-below-the-waterline catastrophic about this colourful and energetic production which tells, by way of metaphorical Micronesian microcosm, the stumbling steps that unfettered humans must take to create a nation - language, law, governance, rituals, science and so on.
The story of civilisation is told by a shipwrecked Victorian girl Daphne (a spirited and delightful Emily Taaffe) and an earnest loin-clothed boy-man Mau (Gary Carr in fine fettle) who stand together, alone, on a storm-ravaged island in a parallel world in 1860 and set about the task of reinvention - of themselves and the world around them.
OK, so that makes it sound Worthy with a capital W - but, on the flipside, there's a big puppet warthog and starchily amusing grandmamma and the Gentlemen of Last Resort and blood-thirsty sharks and vertical waves and shipwrecks and swaying grass skirts and gunshots and comic asides and cultural allusions and musical numbers and director Melly Still's dazzling - I mean really dazzling - effects projected onto three mighty screens and some committed performances from an all-round jolly and likeable cast.
But... but it's too much. It sprawls like a louche cad on a chaise longue.
Based on Terry Pratchett's stand-alone novel and scripted by Mark Ravenhill, its 2hr 25min length, I suppose, gives heft to its purpose - which has a deep sense of (po-facedly PC) morality and it trundles between heavyweight concepts such as colonialism and faith and gender and race and, I guess, if I were 13 I would think myself mighty clever to have stayed the course.
But I would have preferred some characters with foibles and wit, rather than mouthpieces on a mission, and I would have liked to have seen my heroes overcome a series of escalating and well-defined obstacles that inspired tension and thoughts of adventure and I would have wished that one piece of peril fit naturally with the next without the need for a shoehorn or a shotgun.
And I would have liked a lot more of the warthog and a lot less of Milton the parrot who said 'boobies' and 'knickers'. (He stopped being funny in the first act and became a lame plaster to cover a general dearth of whimsy.)
And I wouldn't want anyone giving birth on stage (especially not to a puppet) and I'd be concluding, round about the third wailing contraction, that, on the whole, a lot less would have have meant a lot more.
