The audience files in and faces a stage decked with American flags and a full curtain. Land of the Free, designed by Kate Bunce, couldn’t be more patriotic.
There’s a piano, and once the play starts (a play which is more than aware it is a play) the anthem of the United States, “The Star Spangled Banner”, is discussed for its “troubling” content.
The Statue of Liberty’s torch, its vibrancy hidden in the murk of the New York sky, is mentioned as a beacon of truth. But what is truth, how do we find it, and how do we know what it is?
Pictures are added to the sides of the theatre’s fake proscenium to represent real and failed assassignations from Lincoln (1865) to Trump (2024). These capture a moment, frozen in time.
It is Abraham Lincoln (Clara Onyemere) and his killer, actor John Wilkes Booth (Brandon Bassir), who are the subject of Land of the Free, written by Sebastian Armesto and Dudley Hinton, presented by Simple8.
It is quickly apparent this will not be a linear drama, and that many of the performances will be turned up beyond traditional levels. This particularly applied to Owen Oakeshott’s caricature of Junius Booth, the father.
A cast of seven plays thirty billed characters. Women play men (notably Clara Onyemere, a black woman who portrays Lincoln in a finely drawn portrayal), but not the other way around.
Now and again you may get lost about who’s who (I mistook Dan Wolff’s Harry Hawk as Edwin Booth more than once), but the over-emphasis on tell, not show, helps with identification.
Across a two-hour performance time plus interval (too long by at least 20 minutes), we move from 15 years before Lincoln’s murder to the immediate aftermath and fatal shooting of Booth.
In-between the focus is on the future assassin, his childhood with a tyrant father who mocks and belittles him, his unfulfilled love life, his increasing and fanatical sympathy with the slave-owning South.
As his acting career progresses, the play Julius Caesar is mentioned over and over again, with its motif of killing for political reasons and “for the good of the country”.
Southern songs punctuate the action, but this is not a musical. Renditions of “Beautiful Dreamer”, “Dixie”, and “Amazing Grace” are uneasily set against the resentment of a Union in crisis and a president who sees to find compromise.
Notable moments concerning the rights and daily life of those released from slavery stick deep: not being allowed into a celebratory election party or having access to accomodation or employment in their “freedom”.
The civil war itself is so complicated historians still disagree about it now. Lincoln’s form of emancipation, of just letting it die out, would never be enough to keep the country from war, or to appease extremists.
If this sounds vaguely familiar in the year that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, a white man and a black woman, seek the highest office in the country and vie to “Make America Great Again”, then that is no coincidence.
However, I would have liked more contemporary comment and parallels and less segues into artifice such as a scene in verse, or a detour into the gruelling backstory of Boston Corbett, the man who killed Booth, and I didn’t really like the timeline which jumped all over the place.
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Land of the Free continues at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 9 Nov with details here.
Image credit: KatieC Photography
