How does a young republic believing itself to have a God-given mission to lead the world towards a new era of freedom, equality and justice end up mired in blood and terror?
On a day when the rhetoric of President-elect Obama’s victory speech was reverberating around the world, it was interesting to compare the rhetoric of 200 years earlier in Glyn Maxwell’s new play about the French Revolution. Liberty, the first play from the main stage of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre to tour nationally, is a loose adaptation of Anatole France’s novel The Gods Are Thirsty, which charts the rise and fall of Evariste Gamelin, an idealistic artist who becomes a fanatical proponent of The Terror as the revolution comes under attack, both real and imaginary.
The parallel with the United States since 9/11 is clear and deliberate. While there is an issue of proportion – we haven’t actually seen tumbrils rolling through the streets of Washington – there has clearly been an erosion of civil liberties at home and abroad, along with a dismaying tendency to beat down rational debate with the fist of patriotism. The paradoxical position to which Gamelin gravitates is that a little terror now is a price worth paying to buy Utopia. But as he discovers to his cost, revolutions have a way of consuming their own.
It threatens to be a rather dry history lesson but puts just enough flesh on the bones of its characaters.
Final performance tonight.
