Review by John Gibson Venue 21. C Venues.

★★☆☆☆

The Roman Eagle Lodge sits atop Johnston Terrace where the venue is located, and D.R Hill’s play will take place amidst the square and compass iconography of these hallowed walls. This is the perfect place in which to stage an appraisal of the professional life of Oswald Mosley; Britian’s best known fascist. 

Despite such an authentic setting, the play suffers from a lack of creativity both with the script and the production design. With many productions constantly devising fresh ways to enliven the limitations of Fringe venues, here we are relying on projected images of pivotal moments in the man’s life on an undulating curtain. This is, of course, either a limitation of the space or an oversight, but the fact that the set remained unchanged throughout the (apparently truncated) seventy minute running time suggests the latter

The Mosley story seems a perfect cypher for an examination of  the rise of the contemporary right, but perhaps due to the difficulty of ascertaining who exactly can be called fascist anymore, the play similarly struggles to find a consistent message. Mosley’s first pronouncement as leader of the Black Shirts is a pledge for no class distinctions (whilst acknowledging that class distinctions exist), freedom of speech and the entitlement to a full life (provided that life is white and not Jewish). These first two observations have been subsumed by an identity politics worldview which places individual barriers of identity ahead of class.

Mosley’s life consists of attempting to grow his base, juggle his wife and mistress (s), and resist attempts to turn the British Union of Fascists (BUF) into a British Nazi party. These many early scenes feel like dramatic reenactments and don’t add anything to this period of British history, whereas once the story moves onto his later life there are finally some dramatic experimentations that utilise the able cast. And it is no coincidence that these depart from the staid drawing room chats.

As it is, we get a very safe and remarkably predictable retelling of meetings and speeches from a divisive character, but the staging and the lack of ambition in the script leave the audience wondering just exactly what the point was.