Why do we tell stories to each other? What do the stories we tell say about us? Why do we like stories that scare us or make us cry? Why are some people more skilled at telling stories than others? What do our stories reveal about our personal relationships and the power structures between narrator and listener?
None of these questions were satisfactorily answered in Annie Baker's two hour long (no interval) new play The Antipodes which I had the pleasure of seeing at The National's Dorfman Theatre yesterday afternoon. But that didn't matter at all. Theatre is more about asking questions than giving answers and The Antipodes asked more than Jeremy Paxman. Not just questions about storytelling but questions about the ethics of work, questions about the human capacity for both kindness and cruelty, questions about the darkest recesses of our mind, and questions about both racism and sexism in the workplace.
Baker's John (a three hour long rollercoaster ride of emotions and ideas) had been my theatrical highlight of 2018 and I was keen to see if The Antipodes was on the same level. It wasn't quite - but it didn't fall far short. After a lukewarm start I was riveted at this rather unsettling story of a group of writers who meet each day around a glass topped oval table to thrash out ideas for stories. Always, or usually, under the watchful eye of their boss Sandy (Conleth Hill).
Sandy, whose long grey hair, matching beard, and denim jeans give him the stonewashed air of a man who owns a ten gallon hat shop and moonlights as a Kris Kristofferson tribute act at the weekend, likes to tell people, often, how much of a 'nice guy' he is but there's something a little sinister about how much power he has, how he bans mobile phones from meetings but is forever glued to his own one, and how, when things start to go tits up, he starts to go AWOL.
His charges are a transatlantic bunch (perhaps Baker, a Bostonian, felt this would play better with British audiences). There's Danny M1 (Matt Bardock), an intense Ross Kemp with a degree who seems to delight in telling stories about his own penis, there's Dave (Arthur Darvill) who is often seen tucking into tubes of Pringles and puts his socked feet atop the desk in an almost aggressively macho manner, there's quiet Danny M2 (Stuart McQuarrie), and there's Hadley Fraser's Josh who's prone to going down rabbit holes of thought and obsessing over the nature of time.
All, like Sandy, are male and all are white which can make Adam (Fisaya Akinade) and Eleanor (Sinead Matthew) stand out. But not as much as Sandy makes them feel as if they're standing out. Sandy's assistant and note taker Brian (Bill Milner) is observed at one point to be taking less notes when the black guy or the woman talk, Eleanor is castigated by Dave for knitting during a meeting, and there's a whole lot of manspreading and mansplaining going down when the inevitable sexual boasts start to bounce around the room.
Both Adam and Eleanor hold their own in this environment (not all do but I'll not spoil it for you) but that's not the point. They shouldn't have to. Without making race or gender pivotal to the drama, Baker has managed to make salient points about how our Western societies may have come a long way but how we still have far to go.
The stage set was even remotely phallic shaped and the carpet of the meeting room (which wouldn't look amiss in a Wetherspoons pub) even seemed to have some cock shaped design. I started to think of the throne of boxes of Perrier in one corner of the stage as representing a ballbag. I may have been reading too much into the set design.
As this team of writers thrash out ideas and play subtle power games with each other, the action is regularly punctuated by Sandy's assistant Sarah. (Imogen Doel). Sarah gets to wear a staggering array of very fetching floral jumpsuits which acts to remind us that the interactions we're witnessing are happening over a period of days rather than in real time.
She also takes food orders, she's quick with a quip, and when there's a request she knows Sandy won't grant she feigns ignorance and marches out of the room. She's the good cop of the piece but she's also, in many ways, the heart of the drama. Her interventions lend texture and exposition whilst never being heavy handed or overdone.
The same, alas, could not be said of a short section in which our writers don eye masks, look to the sky, and convert with Max. Or the voice of Max at least. Who is Max? He's hardly been mentioned before and he'll hardly be mentioned again and yet in this one scene he seems to have been given some kind of Godlike status. A deity of the scripts!
I'm sure there was some great meaning to be read into it but this one went over my head. The rest of the play, however, was pitched just right and as the writers tortured themselves internally, as they stayed up all night, as they puked on the glass top table, and as they collapsed under sheer exhaustion the meanings and interpretations of the play swivelled with as much ease as the chairs they all sat upon, and in some cases took for a spin round the desk.
An ouroboros was mentioned early in the play and in many ways this was a play that ate its own tail and then came for its own head. We were tied up in knots of meaning as we saw how storytelling is something we do not just to amuse ourselves but to define ourselves. We viewed all humanity and all meaning through the prism of the story and if that could be considered a rather self-serving subject for a dramatist to create a play about then luckily Annie Baker is far too superior at her own storytelling to fall into the trap.
In The Antipodes she's created a spellbinding play and she's fleshed it out with an impressive cast in which I won't name names again because this was, as much as anything I've ever seen, an ensemble piece. Annie Baker didn't give us any answers whatsoever but she certainly asked us some pretty tough questions.
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