A Mirror at Almeida review: Jonny Lee Miller shines in totalitarian satire
There are times when the Almeida’s new production A Mirror feels a little like – whisper it – immersive theatre. You enter the stage through a flower arch to find a pretty believable facsimile of a low-key wedding.
There are tables filled with cocktail sausages and bowls of crisps and plastic glasses of wine. There are chintzy individual chairs in neat rows at the front of the theatre, where normally you would have flip-down pews. There’s a hymn sheet tucked into each seat welcoming you to the nuptials, alongside a troublingly authoritarian address, which the audience is encouraged to recite mid-way through.
A cellist plays and Jonny Lee Miller, clad in a prim suit and gloves, greets people as they arrive. It’s a neat way to draw you into this play’s world of twists and crosses and double crosses.
The first of these comes when it’s revealed the wedding itself is a ruse, a trick by a performing theatre troupe to hide an illegal production taking place somewhere in a province of a totalitarian England (I don’t think the Englishness is ever spelled out but a discordant version of Jerusalem is played on the cello, which is a dead giveaway).
“Tonight’s performance is being staged without a permit from the ministry,” Miller’s character explains conspiratorially.
The Mirror, written by Sam Holcroft and directed by Jeremy Herrin, is concerned with what it means to create art within confines and parameters: is it better to work within a corrupt system, to eke out marginal wins in the face of adversity, or to reject the system altogether and risk being silenced… or worse?
The play-within-a-play follows a young playwright (it’s all quite meta) who has submitted his debut work to The Ministry of Culture, colloquially known as The Ministry for Censorship.
It’s a piece of social realism observing the sex workers and drunks who live in his crummy apartment block – not quite what The Ministry is looking for.
But Director Čelik (also Miller, playing the role as a kind of Goebbels-meets-Victor Meldrew) sees a spark in the young Adem (Michael Ward) and instead of blacklisting him, invites him into his inner circle to learn from another playwright he has allowed to flourish. Under his protection, his ‘favourites’ are allowed to read books banned under the regime, including the works of Shakespeare, and artistically express themselves, so long as they don’t do it too much.
The bulk of the action takes the form of readings – plays-within-plays-within-plays – with Čelik, his wet-behind-the-ears assistant Mei (who he fancies), and Adem acting out, hilariously badly, both Adem’s work and that of more accepted propagandists.
Unfortunately, a peek behind the curtain doesn’t result in Adem and Mei idolising Čelik but rather seeing the entire system for what it really is.
It’s a slick satire, a genuinely, laugh-out-loud send-up of totalitarianism, filled with brilliant performances, not least from the ever-charismatic Miller. It almost feels churlish to point out that I don’t think it’s actually very good.
The text, always extremely pleased with itself, doesn’t bear much scrutiny, and beneath the charisma of the cast is a fairly flimsy examination of the role of artists in a world where censorship and violence is on the rise.
Still, that trifle aside I can’t remember when I last enjoyed myself this much at the theatre.