Life
Theatre review: Rare Earth Mettle
A storm of protest over antisemitism caused a last minute name change for a billionaire character. But how was the play itself?
November 21, 2021 08:01
A storm of protest over antisemitism caused a last minute name change for a billionaire character. But how was the play itself?
November 21, 2021 08:01So Hershel Fink is now Henry Finn. The change was made after it was pointed out that to give a fictional, morally bankrupt Silicon Valley billionaire a Jewish name is deeply dodgy and perpetuates a racist stereotype.
The Court admitted “unconscious bias” and has announced a series of consultations with “individual members of the Jewish theatre community as well as some prominent Jewish figureheads.”
But the question hanging over Al Smith’s ambitious, continent-hopping three-hour epic, which explores the damage that can be done to the planet and to its people by those with good intentions, is, where does “unconscious bias” stop?
Terrifically played by Arthur Darvill, Finn is the best thing about Hamish Pirie’s over-long production which overreaches for contemporary relevance by scooping up just about every hot topic in the news. The legacy of colonialism, the exploitation of developing nations by white western powers, globalisation and the climate crises are all present. A lack of ambition is not a problem here.
Rather like the real life Elon Musk, the protagonist is the CEO of a privately owned electric car company. His business model relies on cheap lithium, a rare resource found under Bolivia’s salt flats which Finn attempts to buy. So does Anna (Genevieve O’Reilly), a maverick NHS doctor obsessed with the possibility that lithium can increase mental health if introduced to the water supply like fluoride.
Whoever wins the rights to this resource has to go through Kimsa (Carlo Albán), a single parent rooted by his indigenous heritage to the land on which he lives with his 12-year-old daughter. She meanwhile suffers from a rare form of cancer caused by toxins left from when the British used to mine tin there.
Smith weaves a complex plot of serial betrayals as deals struck between Anna, Finn and rising local politician Nayra (Jaye Griffiths) go belly-up. But although the twists are fun to follow, the unlikely plot relies heavily on the antics of a Machiavellian NHS doctor whose obsession with the health of Stockport (apparently a centre of bad mental health) sees her contravene multiple laws even the hippocratic oath. Credulity is stretched to breaking point.
Finn however is the more believable of the two. A loose canon whose quick decisions leave his staff floundering in his wake, he too breaks multiple codes, moral and business. If he was conceived as a Jew, the show’s creatives would have had to change the line about a priest being present as his mother dies. Yet had the name Fink stuck the references to tax-dodging schemes and the very present idea of him making profits out of the climate and fossil fuel crisis would have been uncomfortable.
And although this next point opens me up to the charge of gross over-interpretation, the scene in which he stands chastened by the failure of his plans has a whiff of Shylock’s humiliation about it. This is all deeply unfair on the production of course. But that is the thing about “unconscious bias”. It is unfair to everything it touches.
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