Review: CANCELLING SOCRATES by Howard Brenton at Jermyn Street Theatre 2 June - 2 July 2022

“profoundly funny about something profoundly serious” ★★★★

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is King? No, of course he isn’t, as the one-eyed man can see all sorts of things that make other people think he’s entirely mad. Colours? Horizons? What in the name of Hades are you talking about, man? Which brings us to Socrates, sage of Athens in its democratic pomp, ever-questioning, never-answering, inspiration to Plato, figure of satirical fun to Aristophanes.

We all know a Socrates (Jonathan Hyde), so clever he can tie you in a philosophical tangle even while he walks the stony ground with no shoes on. Wise and deep or infuriating clever-clogs? You pays your money, you takes your choice. Euthyphro (Robert Mountford) certainly thinks so, harmlessly going about his business in the polis until he’s not quite quick enough to dodge behind a pillar before Socrates catches him for a bewildering discussion on divinity and the nature of justice. A discussion which ends with the cheery news that Socrates is on trial for his life for what he’s said about the Gods. A practical man might worry about the Hemlock at this point, but the sage is fascinated by the amusement an address to the 501 citizens of his jury might afford.

Howard Brenton’s title does all the work needed in drawing contemporary relevance from the cancellation of a man who simply asked questions about everything and exercised his right to upset people with them – even, heaven forfend, the Young! And his new play, world premiering at Jermyn Street, is profoundly funny about something profoundly serious – the right to speak as we please and to think as we like, to withhold an opinion in an increasingly binary age until the shades of grey of an argument have been tested and tried. To accept that the wise man ‘knows’ nothing while the fool is certain and unyielding to nuance, argument, fact.

The staging’s simple but witty (even the sign for the toilets is in English and ancient Greek), representing marketplace, home and death cell with minimal change, and the four-strong cast uniformly excellent. Hyde’s a brilliant eccentric, delighted by a new paradox, cheered by incomprehension of the world around him, and company of which a little might well go a long way. His shifts to puzzlement at a new idea followed by immediate delight at the questions it prompts in his mind are a joy to behold, a lovely performances of lights and shades, sometimes in the space of a sentence.

Much of the comedy belongs to Robert Mountford in dual roles as his friend and his gaoler, nicely differentiated vacuous posh boy and practical man of the people, not least in respectively nervous and eye-rolling reactions to the wilder fancies of Socrates. 

Hannah Morrish is Socrates’ much younger wife, Sophie Ward his long-time mistress, both in love with his brilliance, infuriated with his impracticality. Each, too, is ambitious for a voice of their own in a democracy that listens only to men, and if the play has a flaw, it lies perhaps in the irony that these two female roles are less well developed than the male ones, with the comic energy in particular picking up once the domestic scene is done.

In the end, of course, Socrates drinks the hemlock, expecting curious new sensations when he reaches Hades, the ultimate cancellation of a difficult thinker, but happily no cancellation at all of thought that survives and shapes us 25 centuries on.

Howard Brenton is too brilliant to labour the point that curiosity, questioning and thought still make the intellectually inflexible uncomfortable to the point of silencing, even killing, those with whom they imagine they disagree. He’s brilliant enough to make it funny and profound even in the last breath of an annoyingly dazzling man.

Images: Steve Gregson

CANCELLING SOCRATES by Howard Brenton

Jermyn Street Theatre, 2 June to 2 July 2022

Box office: https://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/show/cancelling-socrates/

Cast

Jonathan Hyde SOCRATES

Hannah Morrish XANTHIPPE

Robert Mountford EUTHYPHRO/GAOLER

Sophie Ward ASPASIA

Creatives

Director - Tom Littler

Set and Costume Designer - Issy Van Braeckel

Lighting Designer - William Reynolds

Sound Designers - Max Pappenheim and Ali Taie

Assistant Director - Becca Chadder

Reviewed by David Weir