There are two sorts of scenes that the Globe Theatre, with its intimacy and sky-open space, relishes: light sexual comedy, and big dramatic set pieces. The second new play in the Globe's 2008 season, Glyn Maxwell's Liberty, set towards the end of the French Revolution, contrives to present a collection of each of those.
The comedy comes before the interval, the time mostly taken up by a picnic at which a frivolous young seamstress, Elodie (played with winsome gaiety by Ellie Piercy) tries to distract a dedicated but callow young revolutionary, Evariste Gamelin (David Sturzaker), from his speechifying and philosophising. Trying to set him back on course is the scheming Louise (Belinda Lang), while also providing distraction is his more sophisticated, and less driven, old friend, Philippe Demay (played with show-stealing charm by Edward Macliam).
The dramatic set pieces come later, as Gamelin rises, pushed by Louise, and inevitably falls, as the turbulent final paroxysms of the Revolution play themselves out. Besterman has a particularly fine piece of wildcat, spitting defiance in the face of the guillotine, and the pathos pulses from a prison scene between a hardbitten bit-part actress Rose (Kirsty Besterman), and Maurice, the Lucretius-spouting former duke for whom she's surprisingly but believably fallen. And the Globe, as it always does, proves the perfect setting for a fine tumbril scene - as the cart rolls among the inevitably discomforted groundlings.
This is a story based on Anatole France’s 1912 novel Les Dieux ont Soif (usually translated as "The Gods Will Have Blood"), although the dialogue is all the playwright's own, written in unrhymed iambic pentameters — but not obtrusively so. And the play is marked by a fine stream of one-liners; my favourite was when Demay complained once that, "public safety was trying not to put your feet in horseshit".
Article comments