“Land of the Free” at Southwark Playhouse (Borough)

Jeremy Malies in South London
21 October 2024

Stage left the drawing of President McKinley struck down by Leon Czolgosz at a trade fair in New York in 1901. Stage right a photo of the chaos following John Hinckley Jr.’s attack on Ronald Reagan at the Washington Hilton in 1981. You could be forgiven for thinking you had walked into the set for Sondheim’s Assassins. But this is in fact an outstanding new play written by Sebastian Armesto (who also directs) and Dudley Hinton. It is a collaborative work by the ensemble Simple8 and shows the run-up to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and events that followed.

Natalie Law, Sara Lessore, Hannah Emanuel.
Image credit: KatieC Photography.

Most of us know that John Wilkes Booth was an actor, and a celebrated one, but it came as a surprise to learn that he had a successful actor brother (Edwin played by Dan Wolff) and a famed actor father Junius Brutus (Owen Oakeshott). Junius Brutus had even been in a London production of Boucicault’s 1841 play London Assurance which was unaccountably (for me at least) revived by the National Theatre in 2010.

The plot of Land of the Free begins in 1850 with the Booth children (as adolescents) raiding the dressing-up box at their sprawling Maryland estate and acting out Julius Caesar with fervour matched by skill.

A wonderful entrance has Junius Brutus appear (still in costume) as Cardinal Richelieu, having been unable to face any more of a dire period comedy tour of the provinces. He says he walked out just before the start of the Thirty Years’ War!

Later, Oakeshott will play the piano ruminatively in what was one of my many takeaways. Several cast members take a turn, and tease syncopation out of American anthems, notably parlour songs and patriotic pieces by Stephen Foster. A version of “Beautiful Dreamer” (musical supervision by cast member Hannah Emanuel) is still with me. There is exquisite unaccompanied voice and part singing. But it should be stressed that this is not a musical; it is a play with music.

Lincoln is played by Clara Onyemere who is one of three cast members to play both male and female roles. Onyemere is skilful in hinting at (but not giving full vent to) the character’s oratorical skills and the wry, detached but always good-natured humour.

Sara Lessore, Clara Onyemere, Hannah Emanuel.
Image credit: KatieC Photography.

As John Wilkes Booth, Brandon Bassir has all the presence you would expect to portray somebody once described by a war reporter as the handsomest man in America. Courtship scenes with socialite fiancée Lucy Lambert Hale (played by Natalie Law) manage to reek of both chivalry and heady sexual musk at the same time.

I just wonder if the script could have spelt out in absolute terms that Booth killed Lincoln not just to underline a love of the South in general but as a statement in defence of slavery. I may have missed mention of it, but (as so often in civil wars) the brothers had different outlooks, and Edwin was a Unionist. This could have been explored as a theme.

And the play Our American Cousin being performed on the night of the murder? It’s a formulaic farce by Punch journalist Tom Taylor about the difference between English and American culture with a plot hinging on an inheritance. Mercifully we see none of it, but the writers give us the intriguing detail that Booth had been in a production of the play. He could therefore anticipate a likely big laugh line that might muffle the sound of his derringer pistol as he stormed the president’s box.

The writing team have filleted a wealth of biographical information about a famous family to give us pertinent, often amusing but also poignant detail that plunges us into the period. (“War has a way of changing all the rules, doesn’t it?” is inserted into a love scene.)

A short unmannered programme essay by Armesto and Hinton (what a change from the bilge I wade through weekly) describes how the company sought to make an assassination of a president by an actor in a theatre relevant without resorting to tacky metatheatricality. The scene in which Booth and a co-conspirator are tracked down to a tobacco barn in Port Royal, Virginia, smacks (in the right sense) of Patrick Barlow’s adaptation of The Thirty-Nine Steps.

A poster for the show has Donald Trump standing to attention as he scrutinizes a portrait of Lincoln. Whatever your politics or opinion of Orange Man, Booth’s Latin tag “Thus always to tyrants” is resonant after the recent assassination attempt. I don’t see Kamala Harris or Trump being first-night stalwarts at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (a sad irony right there) in Washington during a term of office. But I do see the company Simple8 creating many more plays of this exceptional quality and am now a fan.

Land of the Free never resorts to clunky parallels but has much to say about contemporary society. While obviously not of the same gravity, you could in part equate the Civil War with our own culture wars. Booth’s final act of rage against Lincoln was after the president made a speech about immigration. And it should be noted that Booth was aligning himself with an anti-immigration party when only 16 years old.

There is relevance to the recent anti-immigration riots in the UK. Argument over border walls, so-called border czars, and inflamed nationalist rhetoric will outlast the terms of whoever wins next month’s election. An impressive scene set in 1860 has Lincoln and a senior Republican reflecting on the fact that it is quite possible to win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College. Topical again, and a contentious issue for present-day Americans.

Just a thought. Simple8 create new work, but I should love to see them put on an irreverent production of Julius Caesar with music. Our American Cousin remains (rightly) obscure, its only claim to fame being as the backdrop to the terrible events portrayed here. Perhaps the saddest aspect to all this is that many members of the Booth family said they wanted to be remembered for their art.