Holding Fire!

I was excited to see this subject tackled in a new play by Jack Shepherd at the Globe. Holding Fire! follows the fortunes of the leaders of the Chartist movement, from its initial inception through to the changes it helped bring about some thirty years later.

In a parallel narrative, we also follow the fortunes of Lizzie Bains, a flower seller whose journey is interwoven with that of the Chartist movement.

In the programme, Shepherd notes that the hardest thing about writing the play was working out a structure, and you can see his point - the structure remains the central weakness in a play that tries to include too much, tries to give too many people a voice and, in doing so, dilutes the power of the story.

Chartism was an important movement which gradually became radical, calling for strikes and eventually leading to riots. The chartists frightened the government so much that they often set the army on them. However all sense of a time in turmoil is missing from this play; there is no sense of the urgency and passion of the movement.

The play focuses on two of the Chartist leaders: William Lovett and Fergus O'Connor. These characters give passionate speeches, often directed deliberately at the groundlings, and there is the occasional sense that the audience is being swept into their fervour for reform, but this is too rare.

Shepherd does however manage to illustrate the terrible poverty and desperation that existed in the mid-nineteenth century and, through Lizzie's story, shows the lack of choices of people born into poverty, especially women.

However, these separate narratives are not interwoven as well as they could be, and the play feels annoyingly disjointed as a result.

Though it stumbles structurely, director Mark Rosenblatt and designer Janet Bird have at least grasped the challenge of how to stage this play in the Globe's unique space. They use every part of the theatre: speeches are given from platforms within the yard, and the stairs up to the balcony and into the audience are used in a way that I have never seen in any other Globe production. Inventive as it was, I am not sure this was always appreciated by the groundlings who spent a lot of the three hour running time having to move out of the way.

It is really good to see Dominic Dromgoole commissioning new work for the Globe: In Extremis staged again this summer after last year's success, was superb. However, while I applaud Shepherd's choice of topic, Holding Fire simply tries to do too much and fails to convey the significance of this revolutionary time.

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