Raine could have done more to flesh out her rape case, which plays very much like a secondary shadow of the main relationship plot.
But Raine never resorts to scornful caricature, leaving the audience to play judge and jury toward her believably flawed protagonists.Īs Gayle, Craney is plausible but functional, her role as downtrodden victim more symbolic than fully rounded. Ingleby also does subtle work as the clownish beta male of the group, a dark horse who proves surprisingly destructive over the long haul. Playing a proudly stubborn couple torn apart by competing narratives, as in a court case, Blakley and Moore both give full-spectrum performances that reach a crescendo of stormy love-hate convulsions in the second act. The original National Theatre cast was marginally more diverse. The all-white ensemble of this new production also feels oddly anomalous on a contemporary West End stage, where color-blind casting is increasingly the norm. Raine plays a few tricksy games with structure, chiefly in two scenes where related but separate conversations overlap, but these are fleeting experimental flourishes in an otherwise solidly traditional two-act piece. In formal terms, Consent spends much of its two-hour running time in familiar dinner-party farce territory, taking potshots at the self-deluding hypocrisy of the metropolitan middle classes. “An apology has to cost something or it’s not an apology,” Kitty seethes at Edward. This is where Raine’s fascination with weaponized language really bites, not in unpicking the nuts and bolts of courtroom procedure, but in exposing the gaps between hollow legal victory and real justice, between noble rhetoric and devious intent, between carefully neutral expressions of regret and sincere confessions of guilt. Impersonal legal concepts suddenly become very personal indeed. A second rape, this time within marriage, forces the whole group to rethink their glib use of slippery legalese jargon to legitimize their own venal, violent acts.
By the second act, Edward and Kitty are heading for a bitter divorce and custody battle. Unresolved issues of sexual infidelity, past and present, take a toll on all the main characters. Outside the courtroom, where most of Consent takes place, all this lofty ethical posturing plays out somewhat differently.
Between baby-cradling duties, Edward casually shares the grim details of his latest case, defending an accused man on trial for rape. All four are well-heeled legal professionals. This is Max, the newborn son that London lawyer Edward (Stephen Campbell Moore) and his wife Kitty (Claudie Blakley) are proudly showing off to their friends Rachel (Sian Clifford) and Jake (Adam James). In a suble foreshadowing of some of the dramatic dilemmas ahead, Consent opens with a real baby onstage, one of six sharing the role. A witty discourse on weighty and newsworthy matters, Consent feels universal and finely crafted enough to make another transatlantic transfer viable. Though their themes are different, both dramas are closely concerned with the willful miscommunication and stealth power games that shape intimate relationships. Consent shares the same director, Roger Michell of Notting Hill fame, and uses a similarly elegant style of nimble scenes crisply divided by fragrant bursts of music. Raine earned international acclaim in 2012 with her prizewinning breakthrough play about deafness, Tribes.