John (National Theatre)
Simultaneously the most interesting and most boring play I’ve seen in a long time.
There will no doubt be many takes. Mine is that it’s about the way we are haunted by our past relationships in the same way the ground is haunted by bloodshed. It’s set in a Gettysburg B&B that was used as a Civil War hospital (one scene includes this gruesome description of amputated limbs, piling up outside the windows) and I think there is a Native American incantation at one point too.
As one relationship breaks down, the tropes of old horror movies are everywhere: the dolls, the strange painting of a ghostly woman, the old blind lady (all of them watching), the piano that plays itself, the flickering christmas tree lights, the candles, the overt witchy womanhood of menstrual blood and period cramps… There’s apparently a man wasting away in an adjacent room, there’s a story of madness, of scorpions in the brain, and there’s a secret room in the house that sometimes misbehaves. We’re overloaded with signs that we have learnt to read as precursors to horror, to some kind of supernatural activity. Even the names ring in our ears a certain way, with young Jenny and older Genevieve making us wonder aloud if we are actually witnessing some kind of time travel — both are involved with men called John, whose own name also has a special resonance, being the title.
The traditional Annie Baker pauses are here aplenty. Which is fine, they’re her thing. And they work, largely. I mean, beautifully observed meandering conversation is obviously brilliant, but by the third act it feels a bit like the world’s stopped spinning. It feels like nothing will ever happen in your life every again. Then finally — FINALLY — it appears for a moment like all the spooky shit might have finally tipped over into The Thing, The Thing that Going To Happen, The Thing That’s Obviously Going To Happen In Order For The Play To Have Anything Like A Climax. Jenny (who has been fixated on one doll, the exact one that she had as a kid) suddenly becomes weirdly stiff and floppy at the same time, rigid at the hips and shoulders but entirely submissive and pliable, and you think for a second shiiiiiit she’s been magicked into a doll! For a whole minute or so! But then it turns out she’s just pissing about. It’s one of those moments in a failing relationship when the playfulness returns for a second and you think actually maybe this is going to be okay for them, until you realise it’s not and they’re just completely, completely over. Which is kinda nicely undramatic and real, but I can’t pretend it’s not also massively disappointing that she hadn’t really been magicked into a doll. Because without that, fuck all has really happened. All that spooky shit foreplay and no orgasm.
There are moments to love: the description of a sunset, the weird ‘thud’ of a speciality breakfast item, the disruption of the second interval (v Caryl Churchill), and the fact that we see a woman openly dealing with crippling period cramps in a major play staged at the National Theatre. And I’m a big fan of plays that invite me to solve them. Just not so into boring slow plays where fuck all happens for three and a half hours.
