What a Carve Up!, online, review: star-studded satire that's murderously enjoyable
The timing of this star-studded online adaptation of Jonathan Coe’s breakthrough 1994 satirical thriller is spot-on, in all kinds of ways. It speaks to the current moment, even as it rewinds past the 1991 invasion of Iraq to the 1980s and the rapacious heyday of Thatcherism (and further back still, to the inglorious aftermath of Suez).
Its handling, frame by frame, of narrative suspense answers the post-modern collage effects of Coe’s prose while keeping you on the edge of your seat. More broadly, just as theatre is forced back into hibernation with a new lockdown, it arrives with a technical and artistic bravura that bodes well for the sector’s ability to reinvent itself. This doesn’t just look like a plucky digital divertissement, it looks like a game-changer.
Henry Filloux-Bennett, the artistic director of the Lawrence Batley, Huddersfield, made a splash in May with an adaptation of a David Nicholls novel – The Understudy – that accompanied the cast’s self-recorded audio contributions with an ambient animation. There was a degree of updating but broadly speaking it was a glorified radio version.
Here, his creative ambition – and that of his collaborators, including director Tamara Harvey and a team from the Barn, Cirencester, with support from the Wolsey, Ipswich – is of a different order. The production sharply and smartly tilts between exposition and enigma, silliness and deadly seriousness. And there are full-bodied performances nestling amid a ream of archival and mood-setting material (including clips from the 1961 comedy-horror film starring Sid James and Kenneth Connor that gives the story its title and centres on a country-house killing spree that inspires the grand-guignol come-uppance for the leading scions of Coe’s odious Winshaw family).
Enlarging the chronological frame, Filloux-Bennett creates a personable narrator in the shape of Alfred Enoch’s conversationally playful, unassuming Raymond Owen. The latter has turned DIY detective, sifting the evidence surrounding the fateful night of January 16, 1991 (NB also the start of Operation Desert Storm) when six people were bumped off at remote Winshaw Towers, the crime attributed to his famous author father Michael, who was commissioned by dotty spinster Tabitha to produce a probing family history.
Quizzical, cynical, amused and aghast, Raymond shares what he has dug up 30 years on, stopping and replaying the material as he sees fit. A prime source of repeat-play is a 2020 TV interview conducted with Josephine Winshaw-Eaves, whose mother was among the victims; the ghastliness of the murdered right-wing tabloid hack has passed down the line to this breezily callous vlogger and influencer. “Slavery wasn’t even illegal back then”, she splutters at one point, in defence of her ancestors (there’s high-definition work from Fiona Button as the bristling toff, from Tamzin Outhwaite as her bemused interviewer).
She even bats away the idea the family was responsible for Dominic Cummings, who it is claimed interned with (fictitious, of course) political grandee Henry Winshaw. Henry’s dastardly methodology was to bury bad news by topping it with something “outrageous”…
As much as we’re on the hunt for clues, then, we’re joining the dots on Coe’s spruced-up state-of-the-nation accusation about the long lethal arms of the grasping establishment. Whether or not you agree with the political diagnosis (which takes in the pandemic), there’s ample food for thought. And a feast of celebrity in the ancillary roles. Griff Rhys Jones voices a police investigator, Stephen Fry a purring publisher, Derek Jacobi a detective.
Netflix itself would have a task commanding such a Who’s Who, and it’s quite fun deducing who-said-it as you watch. It was produced for just £20,000 and costs a mere £12 to watch – an affordable way to fend off lockdown blues and help our bludgeoned theatre into the bargain.
Until Nov 29. Tickets: Barn Theatre; Lawrence Batley Theatre; Wolsey Theatre. Further information; whatacarveup.com
