Sam Wanamaker would have loved this, simply loved it; you can just see the eyes crinkling in surprise and delight. A play about Thomas Paine, hero of liberty and the American revolution, pamphleteer, polemicist, lover, martyr, hero, and all of it written by that splendid old Marxist Trevor Griffiths, and – and – it's being produced in his beloved Globe theatre. Three hours wouldn't have been enough: he'd be hollering for more until sun-up.
Three hours was, unfortunately, almost but not quite too long for me. A New World is an utterly fine work, visually and in many other ways perfect. And the Globe is the right place to see it. A generally excellent cast mingles with the audience, bouncing and dancing and carting bodies and stocks past bemused but delighted tourists, while the moon rises overhead. The music, the banter, the proclamations – Dominic Dromgoole's production has you straight back in America and France of the 1790s, and you can practically smell the dung and the fear.
Griffiths, rightly revered for a long life's body of work (including Reds) on inequity and principles, and venality, and refusal to compromise, has been trying to get his screenplay of Paine's life filmed for decades; there is often interest, but never funding. This play is his answer, and it succeeds in so many ways, not least by reminding us what a principle is, and the ideals behind the founding of America, and, of course, of the rights of man. Paine's extraordinary life and work, never more relevant, it could be argued, than today (and not just in America but back in what Ben Franklin, our narrator, calls "the king-riddled, class-riddled midden we call Europe") did indeed deserve celebration, and love, and Griffiths has done him proud.
The problem is, perhaps, that Griffiths has done too faithful, loving a job. He tried to hack back the script to the point where he says he couldn't cut any more. There is so much to admire, and this is a full night out (in the literal sense too: once the sun's down it does get coldish), but it's such an extraordinary story I wish it had bounced more to cram in the sweep of Paine's influence, rather than sprawled. There's too much information, too many speeches, fine though they are, and the pace does lag. John Light does a nice enough job as Paine, but it's only really Keith Bartlett as Franklin and a splendid James Garnon as Danton who really lift the pace and fire and humour when they appear. It seems anathema to say this, in a time when we could hardly have more need for principle, and fidelity to ideas, and high-minded ambition, and the (surprisingly young) audience did get an education, but a ruthless culling of the wadding would have made for an even more memorable night. They say, when editing, to "lose your babies", ie get rid of the sections you most often hug yourself about. Then again, on that principle, we'd hardly have any Thomas Paine.
What felt like it was going to be a great night out with Alan Cumming, singing songs and telling tales, loosely based on his recent naturalisation in America – the title comes from his citizenship test – was, sadly, much less than the sum of its parts. Cumming, a rightly feted stage actor, never mind the films, is a likeable, cheeky, talented cove. He can also write good books. Oddly, it never took off. Part of the problem was that the songs aren't very good. Apart from a fine Mein Herr, there was hardly a hummable… anything: they were all those bits of soft not unpleasant marshmallow music which have filled modern musicals: passion in the words, but banal, forgettable tunes: the kind of stuff the Whose Line Is It Anyway? crew would "make up on the spot" when asked to do something in the style of "modern musical about love with a camp twist". Grand backing band. And it didn't exactly bore. But, fine voice though he has, there are better singers; decent stories though he had, there are funnier stand-ups; arch asides though he likes, Graham Norton does them better. It's impossible not to like the man, and the Americans adore him, but perhaps he's had it too easy out there. Welcome back, Alan, dear boy: perhaps us nasty, critical Brits can offer some grit to your oyster. Or at least play you a decent song. In the pantheon of musicals there are, honestly, one or two.