Land of the Free, Southwark Playhouse review - John Wilkes Booth portrayed in play that resonates across 160 years

Straddling the USA Presidential elections, Simple8’s run of Land of the Free could not be better timed, teaching us an old lesson that wants continual learning - the more things change, the more they stay the same.

We open on the Booth family kids rehearsing Julius Caesar (a motif that runs through the play) with John Wilkes Booth already displaying narcissistic tendencies in kids’ squabbles. That changes when their father, a successful British-born actor with a murky past, returns from touring to dominate the space, physical and mental. It’s easy to spot the damage done to Wilkes and one’s mind travels to the role of absent fathers in promoting toxic masculinity today.

Soon we’re off on a time-hopping portrayal of Booth's life - a successful actor, a Yankee sympathiser with The South, not entirely at ease with women, with glimpses of the incel’s rage and, ultimately, an assassin. As an actor, Booth has presence and Brandon Bassir (pictured below bearing an uncanny facial resemblance to his character) gives him some charm, but spending two hours in the company of a man whose neurosis is curdling into psychosis as his Saviour Complex eats into his soul, proves, inevitably, hard work.

The rest of the cast play multiple roles as we track Booth's bubbling, eventually murderous, resentment, psychology today that would more likely produce an active shooter in a school or shopping mall. Clara Onyemere is excellent as the calm but committed Abraham Lincoln, who will not compromise on the issue of slavery that animates the Civil War. Owen Oakeshott has a lot of fun going full Brian Blessed as the bombastic father of the Booth siblings, but the rest of the cast have a harder time making their marks, as their characters come and go too quickly in the episodic structure favoured by writers, Sebastian Armesto and Dudley Hinton.

There’s music, though not enough (swapping out an unnecessary epilogue for a few more traditional songs would improve the show). But that does rather highlight the fact that Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman told us more about John Wilkes Booth in his 20 minutes long segment of Assassins than we learn in two hours of Land of the Free.   

It’s a curious show from its opening apologies for its lack of sets and minimal props and coy explanation of the cross-gender casting (the warp and weft of fringe productions surely?) to its forwards and backwards structure, to its circuitous route to a conclusion that almost all of the audience will know. The nagging thought kept surfacing that the whole thing might work better as a Theatre-in-Education piece, with plenty of cuts and much more pace. That said, its moral that we’ve been here before with a fractured country and things did not end well, will not be lost as the world looks on with some trepidation to November 5th and its aftermath.

For all the acting talent on stage, though even they couldn’t do much with an extended pastiche of Julius Caesar that proved why Carry On Conspiracy was not a thing, the play never gets off the ground. To lean into the old joke, “Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” I’m afraid my answer would be “Not very good”.

• Land of the Free at Southwark Playhouse until 9 November
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