A Family Business

China Plate Theatre productions can be illuminating, frustratingly opaque, dark, humorous, inclusive or maddeningly self-indulgent, but they are always thought provoking and rarely disappoint, if only in their ambition and seriousness of purpose. Along with the likes of Lung, Eastern Angles and Theatre Re, they are a company whose shows I'm inclined to go see whatever the subject matter. Chris Thorpe's latest production, which he both wrote and performs in, conforms to the China template - a mash up of drama, lecture and chat, where the fourth wall is not just broken, it is entirely missing.

The subject to be discussed - Thorpe has constructed his play in a way that feels more like a discussion than a performance - is the life-threatening presence of nuclear weapons, a subject given a newly minted topically given the imminent installation of US controlled warheads at Lakenheath. When I was a lad, the idea of nuclear oblivion felt like a racing certainly. One need only read Martin Amis's Einstein's Monsters or view the terrifying film Threads to gain an insight into the prevalent fever dream at the time of the Cold War. Nuclear weapons terrified us, and yet there was an oddly stoic acceptance that they would see us all off. Since then, the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the impending climate crisis have conspired to knock weapons of mass destruction off the top spot of things most likely to exterminate us. Thorpe's central message is that these weapons are, if anything, more dangerous than ever, especially as we have clearly taken our eye off the ball.

The evening started in what was, in my experience, classic China Plate style, with a disarming chat with the audience. Although tightly scripted (the subtitles were, after all, a giveaway) Thorpe kicked things off with a quiz, inviting the audience to guess the scale of the problem. Norwich got most of the answers right, and did so quickly, which suggested to me he was pushing against an open door. This was an audience not only receptive to the message, but in some respects ahead of it. Nonetheless, there were some effective illustrations of the scale of the issue, and just how much of Norwich would be destroyed by a small to medium bomb (spoiler alert: all of it).

When not talking to us, the action shifted to dramatized scenes, largely involving the work that went into the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It was a chance meeting in a hotel bar between Thorpe and Véronique Christory, one of the architects of the Treaty, that inspired the play, and we get to see and hear Christory, played by Andrea Quirbach, convince Thorpe of the Treaty's significance. Thereafter, the play flips between Thorpe proselytising, and imagined scenes between Chistory and diplomats from the US and Africa. Efé Agwele's African diplomat featured largely to illustrate how much pressure African nations are put under when protesting against the West when they rely on aid. Greg Barnett's US diplomat represented, depending on your disposition, the pragmatism or cynicism, of the West.

Despite Thorpe's obvious admiration for the aims of the treaty, he's a smart enough writer to give some of the best lines to the US diplomat. While the Quirbach's and Agwele's characters celebrate the crossing of a signatory threshold with a night of karaoke, it’s Barnett's character that ponders the irony that the treaty has been ratified by countries that don't have nuclear weapons, and almost by definition don't have the clout to influence those who do. The net effect was balance, but one that, for me, tipped over into a treatise of doom. If this is what hope looks like, then we are in trouble.

So, while the uncertainty of tone in the dramatized scenes were perfectly understandable, far more effective, ironically, were the sections where Thorpe did nothing more than talk to us. Unapologetically polemical, he is such an engaging, effective speaker that, when his fellow performers were on stage, I found myself keen to get back to being told how and when I was about to be blown up. Back in 2017, I saw his Confirmation, in which he explored bias without sets, fellow actors, or any attempt at dramatization. It was a riveting, albeit exhausting, exemplar of persuasive argument, incidentally covering themes pertinent to the mind-sets that perpetuate the proliferation of arms. I can't help but think that a similar approach would have worked just as well here, building up a momentum that the change of scenes too often dissipated.

Nonetheless, taken as a whole, the evening was a worthwhile reminder of potential horrors too easily dismissed when there are so many other things to worry about. Often, theatre is a device for escaping our troubles, and I suppose there's nothing wrong with that, but for those of us that yearn for more nourishing fare, it's good to know something reliably substantial is still being served up on a China Plate.