Joe Penhall is very good at showing how a crisis can be exacerbated by the intervention of experts. In Blue/Orange (2000), a black mental patient became a ping-pong ball in a game between white doctors. In this fascinating and highly topical new play, a conflict over ownership of a song escalates once the legal and psychiatric parasites enter the arena.
Switching between consulting rooms and a recording studio and moving around in time, Penhall doesn’t just give us a contest: he demonstrates the illusion that any piece of art has untainted solo authorship. Cat is a Dublin-born singer-songwriter who has had a big hit that led to an American tour. Bernard is the artist-producer who put an album together with songs by the pair of them. Battle is joined over Bernard’s claim of sole credit for the hit single, but we see how the conflict is intensified as both parties resort to lawyers and seek to sort out their problems through psychotherapy.
Dramatically, the danger is that the issue seems one-sided. Bernard is a bully with a palpable contempt not just for musicians but for singers whom he equates with actors and politicians as people who “breathe life into words they didn’t necessarily write”. Cat, meanwhile, is vulnerable, inexperienced and subject to all the pressures women face in the record industry. It even emerges that, on tour in America, she was lugged from one date to the next by a male crew who treated her as little more than a drugged-up rag doll.
While the play makes the point that the music business treats women badly, it is infinitely more than a loaded conflict over intellectual property. For a start, Penhall has the courage to show the couple at work, where we see how a song is often developed through argumentative give-and-take. Everything is made worse by willy-waving lawyers and musically ignorant therapists who try to provide tidy solutions to intractable problems.
As I see it, the music business is simply a metaphor: what Penhall is really writing about is the way art is often the product of damaged individuals who depend on a degree of collaboration.
The play itself helps to dent the myth of the solo creator. Penhall wrote it but Roger Michell has given it physical life by staging it with a beautiful fluidity that allows the arguments between the six characters to flow back and forth. Disproving Bernard’s thesis that actors are just mouthpieces, Ben Chaplin endows the character with a sadness that offsets his inbuilt arrogance. He may be a vampire but when he expresses to his therapist incredulity that he could ever know his wife’s feelings, you feel that he is trapped inside his own chauvinism.
Seána Kerslake also brings light and shade to the exploited Cat by showing that she is seeking vindictive triumph to compensate for her inability to satisfy her father’s dreams.
Neil Stuke and Kurt Egyiawan as the lawyers buzz around like flies, and Jemma Redgrave and Pip Carter as the therapists remind us of the perils of trying to stabilise creative talent. I’d have liked to have seen even more of Cat and Bernard making music together, but this is a fine play that raises a host of issues without ever trying to resolve them.
- At the Old Vic, London, until 16 June. Box office: 0844-871 7628.
