Written by Nina Raine. Outhouse Theatre Co. Seymour Centre. 1 – 24 June, 2023.
The ever excellent Outhouse Theatre brings Nina Raine’s 2017 UK hit play Consent to the Seymour Centre. A big drama that blends the professional and the personal for a group of British lawyers who prosecute and defend sexual assault cases. These sharp minds come to discover the gap between the legal debates in the courtroom, and the messy, emotional world of victims and the accused to be almost insurmountable.
Kitty (Anna Samson) and her defense lawyer husband Ed (Nic English) are new parents, moving into a new home. Their biggest fights are about where the sofa should go and whether the new light fittings are appropriate. Their friends Jake (Jeremy Waters) and Rachel (Jennifer Rani), also lawyers, are there to celebrate with them, along with Zara (Anna Skellern), an aspiring actress they hope to set up with Tim (Sam O’Sullivan), also a lawyer. Their banter about work is glib with a brutish familial tone. It soon becomes clear that not everything is going well with these couples. Jake and Rachel split after Jake is caught having an affair. Tim and Ed’s friendship is more about professional one-up-manship hiding a long held distrust. All the while Kitty is trying to navigate the incisive minds and tongues of these lawyers to find some honest emotional truths.
A cracking great cast makes this assemblage of rich, entitled lawyers almost, almost likeable in their slick suits and beautiful dresses. There’s an element of Succession-lite in watching them start to tear strips off one another while Raine’s script sparkles with some stunning lines of dialogue. One of their opening salutes to Kitty & Ed’s newborn is to “toast to Kitty’s vagina”. For such a talky play about big topics, director Craig Baldwin keeps things light on its feet, with constantly moving furniture and some evocative one-way mirrored walls.
Many will feel challenged by the way rape is discussed, with a deliberately off-hand, light approach. For these characters rape is a concept to be argued about, not a lived reality, and Raine’s use of marital rape is perhaps too slight for the weight of the topic. But personally, I liked the brashness of the approach. As much as the reality of rape is embodied in the character of Gayle (Jessica Bell), its never really the subject matter of the story. This isn’t actually a play about rape, or the law. Prima Facie it is not.
Consent does the kind of theatrical sleight of hand I don’t really enjoy. It starts with big themes and heavy issues which the writer can’t bring any kind of dramatic resolution to, and so the narrative goes from the universal to the personal to bring things to a close. Here we talk about lot of sexual abuse and the legal system, but the real story is about one couple struggling with the aftershocks of infidelity (with some side swipes at how the upper-middle-class ignore the issues affecting those below them).
In flipping the narrative, it cheats the audience of a resolution to the terrific set up of the first act, and leaves some serious matters unresolved. To its credit though, there is an abundance of grey-areas in each and every character. You loathe and love them in equal degrees. Filled with great dialogue and scenes the performers can sink their teeth into, it brings out the best in the cast.
I was lucky enough to see the original production of Consent in the UK and even then the play left me cold. This new production has more life and comedy than the acclaimed original, and I genuinely believe it to be an all-round better take on the material – the performances, especially Samson and English, are excellent. But the play itself never really hits the bullseye.
Note: This review was based on a preview performance of Consent.
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