A Mirror review: Jonny Lee Miller is fantastic in this drama about art and censorship

You don’t have to watch Sam Holcroft’s intriguing, twisty, metatheatrical new play for long to work out the title. It’s a reference to the idealised role of the writer: a fearless truthteller who holds up a mirror to society, however unflattering the reflection might be.

Holcroft wrote it after being disturbed by first a rigorously stage-managed visit to North Korea, and then a spell at a playwright’s conference in Beirut, where authors spoke of the huge risks they took to criticise their governments on stage. Understandably, writing the kind of play that so often haunts London’s stages – a slick retelling of a classic, or a sexy dinner party drama – didn’t feel like an option. Instead, we open in an unspecified authoritarian regime where a group of theatremakers are pretending to hold a wedding, as (spoiler alert) cover for an illicit play. Accordingly, the Almeida Theatre is decked out with pink and white drapery and balloons, a surreal icing on the deliciously chewy cake that follows.

Straight-talking mechanic Adem (Micheal Ward) has written a play that tells the truth about his life. The Ministry for Culture (its bureaucrats prefer that to their unofficial name, the censorship board) gets out the red pen, striking out Adem’s obscenities and implicit criticisms of the grim, failing society he lives in. It’s unstageable. But still, senior minister Čelik (Jonny Lee Miller) is intrigued by it, by the way its rawness contrasts with the trite dramas about brave soldiers he’s more used to waving through. Miller has a fantastic broad energy in the role of this schoolteacher-ish official, a suit puffed up with all-powerful self-delusion. He totally believes his sentimental urges towards his junior employee Mei (a hilariously awkward Tanya Reynolds) are reciprocated, and is totally convinced that he’s a bureaucratic visionary who’s manipulating the system, allowing creative genius to bloom in a soil contaminated with endless political rules and restrictions. But Adem sees through the guff. Ward’s taciturn bluntness is the perfect foil for Miller’s extravagance, as he gradually nudges at the truth: nothing good can come of putting your creativity in the service of a corrupt system.

On the surface, Holcroft’s play takes aim at censorship in repressive regimes overseas, but it feels like it’s just as much about the compromises Britain’s theatremakers must make – and the way that, for our country’s arts organisations, the most powerful way to silence their critics is simply by hiring them.

open image in gallery

Jeremy Herrin’s direction is fleet-footed and unsettling, underscoring the action with tense jabs of cello. He can’t hide the fact that sometimes the pace drags a little, with a slight excess of pontification about the role of the artist. And although the ground constantly shifts beneath this story, the players in it don’t: their ideological positions are a little too fixed for things to descend into true, knotty, moral chaos.

Still, this play is an achievement: like nothing else you’ll see on London’s stages, full of the kind of meta-theatrical self-awareness that’ll thrill the artsy in-crowd without alienating everyone else. And, if you’ll excuse the cliche, it’ll leave you with much to reflect on.

Almeida Theatre, until September 23