A Mirror review: A timely lesson on dictatorship - The Jewish Chronicle

A Mirror
Almeida | ★★★★✩

If you go to the theatre in a dictatorship such as Belarus there are broadly two kinds of show on offer: those that the government condones and those that will get you arrested for watching or staging them.

Sam Holcroft’s new play replicates one of the ruses used by Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) when illicitly putting on plays in their own country. It involves everyone present including the audience pretending they are at a wedding.

When the coast is clear the ceremony stops and the play starts. There is something uneasy about this vehicle being used here, even by a playwright as good as Holcroft, who has been away from the stage since her dizzying Rules for Living at the National in 2016.

A Mirror Almeida Theatre Micheal Ward

Micheal Ward (Photo: Marc Brenner)

If you want to give audiences in this country a taste of what it is to live under an oppressive regime, the idea that a British playwright will do it more authentically than BFT themselves — who regularly stage productions in exile in the UK — smacks of arrogance.

Still, Holcroft and director Jeremy Herrin thrillingly deploy the deception techniques of underground theatre in an evening that keeps the audience off balance for two uninterrupted hours.

Uninterrupted that is except by occasional coded warnings that the police may be close, at which point the actors snap out of the subversive event everyone has gathered to perform or watch and back into the ritual of marriage until the coast is once again clear.

This already multi-layered evening deepens yet further when the play-within-a-play spawns yet another. No wonder director Jeremy Herrin has compared A Mirror to Russian dolls.

The excellent cast is led by Jonny Lee Miller who is terrifically supported by Tanya Reynolds (Sex Education) and the quietly charismatic Micheal Ward (Top Boys) in his theatre debut.