By, John Nathan
1 min read
ByJohn Nathan, John Nathan
No theatre is showcasing smarter work at the moment than Rupert Goold's Almeida. Whether this astoundingly esoteric show follows the venue's American Psycho and Charles III into the West End is hard to say. But in The Simpsons, American writer Anne Washburn has at least chosen just about most popular TV series ever made as the theme of her post-apocalyptic play, which on the face of it won't hurt its chances of a transfer. And anyone expecting a stage version of the cartoon is going to get just that.
The first of three acts is set after the destruction of American nuclear power stations. A handful of survivors are gathered around a camp fire discussing the episode in which The Simpsons parodies the movie Cape Fear (the Robert De Niro one, if you're wondering). Only they are not exactly discussing it, they are reconstructing it.
One or two audience members appeared to lose patience with what admittedly feels like a conversation in a nerdy fan club, and left. But it is clear that the motive to remember every detail is crucially different from that of normal obsessives who delight in every camera angle and line of dialogue. Here, everyone is desperate to cling on to a unifying culture.
But it's when Washburn's leap of the imagination propels us into the near and then far future that the play really starts make you question what constitutes high and low art in the present.
In the second act, our survivors are part of a theatre troupe who reconstruct not only episodes of The Simpsons but TV advertisements and medleys of chart hits.
It morphs into a wierd allegorical opera
Robert Icke's production is brilliantly convincing in the way it depicts the erosion and distortion of original culture when it is preserved largely through oral storytelling traditions. God knows what originally happened in the stories preserved by the Bible.
The sight of these entertainers earnestly performing music that we recognise as Britney Spears or Daft Punk is darkly hilarious. But it also feels scarily prescient. And as the play morphs into a fantastically weird allegorical opera in which The Simpsons' Mr Burns is depicted as a terrifying figure of death with a radioactive symbol stencilled to his suit, today's cartoon is seen making the transition from low to high culture. My only complaint is that the show confuses low culture with popular culture. Because as everyone who has seen it knows, culture doesn't get much higher than The Simpsons.