Who Do You Think You Were?

Corpus Playroom, Cambridge

BOATS Theatre serve up some thought-provoking drama in this double-bill of plays that make us question the wisdom of digging into the past. What if a historical figure we feel was wrongly maligned, and about whom we long to set the record straight, turns out, on closer inspection, to have been just as cruel a tyrant as he has always been portrayed? What if our efforts to uncover the secrets of our family history throw up nasty surprises that could turn our lives upside down?

The evening kicks off with an impressive directorial debut by Matthew McLaren: a two-hander by Sean Lang called So Much for Buckingham, which opens with Alison – a proud and deeply committed member of a society known as the Ricardians – loitering in a car park in Leicester. This is not just any car park, of course: it is the one that has now been immortalised as the place where the remains of Richard III were discovered in 2012. The Ricardians are a group who dispute the commonly held belief that Richard had his young nephews, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, murdered, arguing that he was libelled after his death to suit the Tudor kings’ narrative. When Richard himself appears in the car park, groaning ominously and angrily repeating the line: “You moved my bones!”, he is blood-soaked and wrathful, a far cry from the serene, clean-cut version of Richard’s ghost seen in the recent Stephen Frears film The Lost King. What follows is a brutal revision of Alison’s own revisionist history, as Richard shatters the illusions she harbours about him, asserting that he did in fact kill the brothers in the tower and that he was a power-crazed villain. So venomously does Chip Colquoun’s Richard lay into poor “Alison of the Ricardians”, chastising her for gazing obsessively at him through rose-tinted spectacles while being an absent mother (for this Richard is familiar with that concept, and knows perfectly well “what a car park is”, thank you!), that one wonders whether the playwright, Sean Lang, has some personal loathing of the Ricardians. We start to hope that Alison will wake up and find it was all just a nightmare, and that she will be able cling to her idealised version of Richard – “very good-looking”, and “a brave soldier!” Richard’s callous mockery of her theories comes as a shock. He tries to guilt-trip Alison for employing a carer to look after her son, who has cerebral palsy, rather than being with him herself. If his confession is to be believed, it is a bit rich of him to criticise Alison for failing to show sufficient care for a loved one. As the drama ramps up, however, Alison starts to wish she had been a little more present in the present…

The message of the play is perhaps that we can never know all the facts about certain historical events or figures, so we ought not to let our interest in them, however passionate, become all-consuming. The play certainly makes you wish that there were some archive of secret documents relating to Richard’s alleged crimes somewhere – one that could be made public by order of the current Prime Minister, so that we can finally get that record straightened out.

Paper Trail

An archive of a different kind is investigated in the second play, also by Sean Lang, entitled Paper Trail. Kirsty Smith plays Angie, and her Australian accent stays strong throughout the play as she politely cajoles Mel, the archivist at a hospital archive in Camden, into helping her research the story of the mother she never knew.

Special mention must be made here of the heroics of Izzy Rees, who stepped in at the last minute, script in hand, to replace a cast member who was sadly ill. Rees set about the task with professionalism, so much so that it was easy to forget she was reading her lines.

We soon learn that Angie was told by the nuns at the Sisters of Mercy convent, where she spent her infancy, that her mother had died giving birth to her. When the Second World War ended shortly afterwards, Angie became one of the many children shipped off to the colonies of empire – in her case, to Australia. Director Richard Purkiss skilfully intertwines the scenes featuring Angie and Mel, set in the early 2000s, with scenes set in the 1940s, where we find out what actually happened to Angie’s mother Joan (played movingly by Lucy Green).

Angie states that she has always been obsessed by the past, whereas her husband has always wanted to focus on the future; we learn why exactly this might have been when the plot takes a sinister turn towards the end of the play. As with So Much for Buckingham, there is the sense here that we are being warned to be careful about poking around in the past, as we may not be prepared for what we discover. Mel refers at one point to the popular genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are, noting that the searches conducted by ordinary people into their family history are not always as satisfying or dramatic as those of the celebrities on the show. She observes that an archivist’s training does not prepare them for the daunting task of delivering shattering news to someone, and at the end of the play she wisely decides not to reveal everything to Angie. In any case, it is high time Mel was getting home to see her mother, for as Angie poignantly says: “If you have family, you’ve gotta stick together!”

There is a nice moment as Joan walks past Mel and Angie in the street outside the hospital archive and Angie turns her head to look at her, the past and the present briefly coming together.