City & Islington News
David Blay

Liberal Angst in Tony's Britain
October 2003, Issue 22

Camarilla opens with a bang. Not a bang in the Busby Berkeley sense, but a literal, flesh-rending explosion. A bomb has gone off in Bond Street, catching in its blast Professor Maggie Tanner and her daughter Rebekah.

Maggie is the original firebrand liberal radical, a veteran of Greenham Common and a well known public commentator on all matter lefty. Her daughter has sold out, choosing to work in PR rather than follow her mother and trade-unionist stepfather's route through the halls of academe.

During Rebekah's recuperation, her stepfather's son from his first marriage arrives to stay and immediately opens a charm offensive on his stepsister.

Traumatised by her recent scrape with death, and with her natural inclination to side with the unknown terrorists who represent the anti-establishment world she has always championed, Maggie's marriage becomes strained. Not just her marriage, either. At this point the play itself begins to creak at the seams under the weight of its many themes and targets.

A drama of complex family relationships, a comedy of sexual tension, a post-9/11 paranoia-fest, a polemic on differences between Trans-Atlantic notions of liberalism, a medical drama. The play could be any of these things, but in attempting to lever so much dramatic fodder into little more than an hour, the plot is always in danger of being eclipsed by the production's weighty ambitions.

That said, there is much of interest to be found in Van Badham's work. The moral dilemmas presented are those that have exercised the minds of left-wing intellectuals for decades, and the interpersonal relationships are sketchy but show promise.

Ultimately, though, despite strong performances - particularly Lois Norman as Maggie - the play attempts to address too many fashionable issues to be really satisfying. The ending should shock more than it does, but by the time the denouement comes around the audience feels too battered by the weight of half-formed ideas to find it wholly believable. Van Badham is clearly angered by the cynicism of contemporary politics, but her anger requires greater focus before being poured directly into the dramatic form.

This is a rare suggestion from someone who is paid to watch theatre, but: Camarilla should be longer. I am usually fully in favour of being back in the bar by 9:15, but this play would benefit from considerable expansion - not of ideas, but of the character development that would give the plot and the concepts contained space to breathe and the veracity they currently lack.