REVIEW: The Motherf**ker With The Hat, Lyttleton Theatre ✭✭✭

The Motherf**ker With The Hat

Lyttleton Theatre

24 June 2015

3 Stars

Book Tickets

Truly, what is the point of those three asterisks? Everyone who sees the poster knows, instantly, incontrovertibly, that the title of the play includes the word Motherfucker. If you are going to be scandalised by that word being printed in full, are you seriously not going to be scandalised by it in its poorly redacted form? Are British audiences truly more conservative than American ones? The play was able to appear on Broadway billboards without asterisks replacing U and C. So, if avoiding offence makes no sense, what other purpose could there be? Cynics might suggest that only a title like that would get audiences in to see a new play by a relatively unknown Puerto Rican/American writer.

It's not clear whose decision it was, or what the basis for the decision was, but it certainly seems curious for the National Theatre to programme a play with the title The Motherfucker And The Hat, to allow it to play without censoring any possibly offensive language used in the dialogue, but refer to it in all publicity and promotional materials with a different title. What, one wonders, did they do when referring to the play on radio or television interviews? Blush and bleep?

Given the number of times the word Motherfucker is bandied around in Stephen Andy Guirgis' play, now playing at the Lyttleton Theatre in a production directed by Indhu Rubashingham, together with sundry other offensive remarks (including one very funny one concerning a "Nun's cunt"), this misplaced sense of 'propriety' is, frankly, embarrassing. It's as if the National Theatre is slightly horrified by its choice.

As well it might be, really, because Guirgis' play is hardly revolutionary, ground-breaking or even particularly startling. Guirgis won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for his most recent play, Between Riverside And Crazy, but The Motherfucker With The Hat won no awards for Guirgis. When produced on Broadway, the play flopped and received, at best, mixed reviews.

Given that there are recent Pulitzer Prize winning works which the National Theatre has not programmed - Annie Baker's The Flick, Quiara Algeria Hudes' Water By The Spoonfull, Kitt and Yorkey's Next To Normal for starters - not to mention recent Tony Award winners like Christopher Durang's Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, one would think that there was something special or unique about Guirgis' play.

But one would be wrong.

It's not that this is a bad play; it's more that it is not really a play at all. It's a series of separate scenes, mostly two-handers, which chiefly concern the central character, Jackie. It doesn't really have any compelling over-arching theme, there is no lyrical, poetic or political beauty to the language, and it does not attempt to shine a light on society or culture in any significant way. It looks and sounds like a short film - not a coherent, magnificent drama worthy of the Lyttleton stage.

In a way, the play looks at different forms of addiction and the consequences of being addicted and escaping addiction. It certainly questions whether the sanctimonious ex-addicts who "stick to the plan" have better morals or sense than those addicts who strive to reform but temporarily relapse. But is that significant enough to justify 105 minutes in a National Theatre auditorium?

Not in my view.

The performances are engaging, one or two astonishing in detail, nuance and power. But this is a play which relies upon dextrously profane insults and threats, and the tangible presence of violence. However, frankly, once you have heard one Motherfucker, another fifty or so make no impression. And where, as here, there is a climactic, testosterone-fuelled, vicious brawl between two tough men (over the woman with whom both have been having sex) which is simply nowhere near as violent and realistic as it needs to be, the central pillars on which the narrative interest rests crumble away.

Ricardo Chavira, formerly of Desperate Housewives, is menacing, tough and surprisingly sympathetic as the violent alcoholic who believes his girlfriend is cheating on him with the titular hat wearer. He turns out to be right, but he misjudges the correct owner of the hat. Chavira is in bravura form and really squeezes every bit of interest out of his character and the situations. It's tough, brutal brooding at its best.

Yul Váquez is quite arresting as curious Cousin Julio who, despite an interest in cooking and a camp persona, is the hard man who can find the gun or have someone killed when needed. His speeches about obligation arising from long held ties of friendship or family are worth the entire evening. It's a superbly fine-tuned performance.

Flor De Liz Perez is sexy, vicious, bad-tempered, foul-mouthed and effortlessly libidinous as Veronica, the girl shared by Jackie and the titular Motherfucker. She spits out offensive abuse with the same rigorous detachment that Julie Andrews enunciates consonants in The Sound of Music, although Veronica's relationship with nuns (see above) is entirely different. Perez gives a top-to-toe performance and when she smacks Jackie in the head with a baseball bat, you pray the understudy is ready to go. It's a full-throttle performance.

As the sanctimonious and duplicitous, and ultimately totally self-obsessed and narcissistic, Ralph, Jackie's sponsor and friend, Alec Newman is blander and less dangerous than is required. He needs to be Jackie's equal, in every way, but especially physically; he is not in Chavira's league. He is not helped by Nathalie Armin, miscast as Ralph's (presumably) trophy wife, Victoria.

The most theatrical aspect of the production is the set, a clever and evocative three piece jigsaw puzzle of spaces - Veronica's Times Square flat, Cousin Julio's place, and Ralph and Victoria's more salubrious accommodation. Fire escape stairs, a vivid orange in colour, hang from the darkness, suggesting clearly the ever-present New York exterior and firmly rooting the place of the action visually, if the words did not do that work aurally. Oliver Fenwick lights everything with his usual fine eye for detail, mood and ambience. You can almost taste the hot dog from the street vendor.

Rubashingham directs economically, and the pace is brisk enough. Nothing however is brought to the table in any kind of visionary way, and this is not a case where directorial insight reveals more of the play than the author might have expected. Violent and obscene, often funny, but rarely hysterically so, this is as "in-your-face" as is ever necessary. The despair-inducing crescendos of spiky, tuneless sound which signify scene-changes, starts and endings, is pointless and facile. There should be no prizes for simply being loud.

It's not boring, it's not bad - but it's not exciting, thrilling or a new direction. The Motherfucker And The Hat promises a wild, offensive ride: instead, it reveals, again, the fallow vision of those currently programming at the National Theatre.

Rufus Norris needs to rise to the occasion of being the Artistic Director of the National Theatre. Theatre, as an art form, urgently needs that to happen.

The Motherf**ker With The Hat runs at the National Theatre until 20th August 2015