Landscape With Weapon…

Joe Penhall is a playwright I really like.

I directed one of his plays, Some Voices, and – whatever the flaws with the production – the script was superb. His Love And Understanding at the Bush remains one of the finest plays I’ve seen and although his following play, The Bullet, felt a bit churned out his acclaimed next, Blue/Orange at the National, was a fascinating play about conflicting ideas on treating mental health patients. Dumb Show at the Royal Court was pretty decent too.

So Landscape With Weapon, a play about a weapons designer named Ned (Tom Holland) who’s forced to confront the reality of the industry he’s involved in, sounded pretty intriguing. And it’s not at all bad. In fact it’s quite good.

Holland is very strong as the morally troubled Ned and Julian Rhind-Tutt is suitably endearing as Ned’s dentist brother Dan, perplexed and worried by his sibling’s sudden role in the whole military-industrial-arms-complex.

In the second half the play shifts from the relationship between the two brothers and shows how Ned is co-erced and pressured into signing his deadly new technology over to a private company by arms firm employee Ross (Pippa Haywood) and shadowy security enforcer Brooks (Jason Watkins).

The play is full of Penhall’s usual sparky dialogue and gallows humour and it has good lines aplenty. But some of it feels a bit like the charade of an episode of Question Time where each person represents a moral position and defends it using exactly the arguments you’d expect them to use.

And the staging, a long rectangle where the cast take opposite sides when they’re arguing their positions and physically come together when they near agreement (be it coerced or based on genuine kernels of understanding) emphasises these moral and political polarities.

There’s a really good play to be written on this subject and, although this is a decent and thought-provoking two hours, it’s too much debate and discussion and not enough drama.

And that’s a shame as I genuinely believe Penhall has a really important play in him. But, even though it ticks many of the right boxes and it is an undoubtedly smart piece of work, Landscape With Weapon isn’t quite it.