13 review, Olivier

Mike Bartlett's 13 promised the new and different, and the opening is certainly spectacular. The stage of the Olivier is dominated by a giant, two-storey, revolving box, a bit like the tardis, that slowly fills with light to reveal haunted sleepers at the windows - almost, it feels, at the edges of a precipice - while a creepy female voice talks of communal nightmares. It's a Hieronymus Bosch collective consciousness. Wow and double wow. And then bow-wow.

Unlucky for some

For eighty minutes we have the setting up of characters - caricatures dominated by Geraldine James as a lonely Tory PM, Danny Webb as the jaded God academic and Trystan Gravelle as John, a messianic seer who stands on a box and woos the masses with the simplistic rhetoric of someone who's two loaves short of the feeding of the 5000. As bearded John gathers his disparate and disillusioned band of disciples - including a solicitor, singing pensioner, murdering American mom, resentful teen tart and an unemployed lecturer, we anticipate a national spiritual awakening after the ice creams. We don't even get a notional one.

The second half could be a totally different play.We move from the Dr Who allusion to David Bowie's Five Years - except Bowie's characters were better rounded. Thea Sharrock's brilliant staging will keep you watching 13 till the end, but as John goes to meet the PM - whose son's death he witnessed - all we get is well rehearsed round-table rhetoric: should the UK enter a war with Iran (sic)? By the end we've learned that idealism is black and white but politics is grey. And iPads are brilliant as face torches on a blacked out stage. The play's failure to produce either cogent anti-capitalist arguments or damnable political statements may explain the inertia of both sides in the current London protests, but it's a disappointment. And what's the 13: Judas?

In conclusion: Bartlett's last play, Earthquakes in London was so brilliant it's still touring. 13 too has touches of that originality, but where in Earthquakes they built a whole picture, here they are daubs on a muddled, muddied canvas.

References
National Theatre 13, tickets
Andrzej Lukowski review, Time Out