Mark Thomas has long been known for his activism, documentarian work, as well as using comedy to hammer home serious issues through the form of spoken word performance. But as far as can be reckoned, he’s never before acted in a play he didn’t himself pen.
In Ed Edward's, England & Son, Thomas plays a figurative and plaintive version of England itself, spinning out a tale of a working class boy, brought up during the Thatcherite years of Short Sharp Shock, and a youth spent idolising his brutal ex-soldier father. It’s a parable, thinly veiled but no less true for it.
What’s clear from this is that while Thomas’s contribution to truth and uncovering illegal misdeeds has been a boon to the world, this gain has been the acting world’s loss. He’s a hurricane of charismatic energy, fearsome and pathetic by measures but always sympathetic and understandable. He takes Edwards's prose and turns it into an amusing pub anecdote that’s gotten out of hand, leaving the audience too gripped to leave and too scared to interrupt. He flows round the circular stage, making eye-contact, smiling and grimacing at the crowd and never once letting anyone feel left out of the story, or let off the hook.
But while this is absolutely top tier theatre, there’s something missing, a pining in the tale that never quite arrives, in part because the harrowing opening scene is such a bludgeon of horror that when the story finally gets round to it, there’s something grimly unsatisfying about it. About the tale in general: there’s a narrative drop-off that isn’t a deal-breaker, but makes you wish for that intangible gut punch, which the finale broadly delivers, but falls just a step below the devastation that such a brilliant build-up warrants.
It’s an absolute recommendation, and a smartly felt condemnation of the UK as imagined or, as Kipling once wryly observed: “...what England seems, an’ not the England of our Dreams.” A duality of horror and pride, built on blood and conquest, and in its fall, a self-consuming monster, passing on hatred where kindness should flow.