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James Garnon as Danton and (right) John Light as Thomas Paine - Photo: John Haynes |
Paine epic’s a pleasure
A NEW WORLD
The Globe
IT is about time the story of the “Most Valuable Englishman Ever” was put on stage.
This biographical tale recounting Thomas Paine’s voyage to the American colonies and his role in overthrowing the British monarchal dictatorship of George the Third whistles through his life and times.
It is a grand, bold, politically important work that had the sellout crowd enraptured.
How the play came to be staged is worth recounting and casts light on how the story is told. The renowned politics professor John Keane, who lives in Kentish Town, wrote the definitive book on the philosopher. Richard Attenborough read it and decided it could be turned in to a film. He spoke to the writer Trevor Griffiths, who had already written and narrated The Most Valuable Englishman Ever, a film about Paine.
It took Griffiths 10 years to complete, and here in lies the rub of this play: Paine’s life was intoxicatingly fascinating, so varied and so important, that Attenborough and Griffiths found they had a Gandhi-style epic on their hands.
Griffiths says his original draft was nearly six hours long. Four drafts later, it had been trimmed.
This theatre version is three hours, but there is still a sense that you are missing out on the whole story.
While it is well produced and brilliantly acted, Paine-ite scholars will want more. The story starts with him embarking for America – leaving behind the intrigues of his earlier life, his run-ins with George the Third as a customs man and his wholly non-political life on board a privateer, commanded by a Captain Death.
It is a battle for Griffiths to keep it simple. Paine’s wrote and distributed for nothing.
He believed information was vital in the fight to emancipate workers.
That meant dismissing Latin as the lingua franca of the ruling classes, and keeping your writing as understandable as possible.
Griffiths should have followed this philosophy. Instead, if you had no background knowledge of Paine, this play would not be a good starting point.
And while this is no criticism of Griffiths, this play really sings when the super cast are given Paine’s original words to read.
It is no wonder Barack Obama chose Paine’s address, “The American Crisis” to kick start his term on the steps of Capitol Hill in January.
Until October 9
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