If a tree falls down in a forest and there’s no-one there, does it make a sound? Two of my favourite answers to this question are: 1) leave a tape recorder in the woods and come back later and 2) who cares? The point of the question, if there is one, is to consider the influence on events of apparently passive onlookers – or onhearers in this case. Matt Charman’s second play at the National Theatre, The Observer, is the story of an international election observation team in a fictive African country holding its first democratic elections. The deputy chief and central character, Fiona Russell, allows herself to become emotionally and politically involved with both the country and her translator Daniel Okeke. An opportunity arises for Fiona to affect the outcome by running an enfranchisement program for rural voters more likely to favour the opposition over the corrupt incumbent.
Richard Eyre’s pacy production exposes the dangers of a lazy lack of cultural awareness: it seems incredible now that anyone could ever have believed that Iraq’s different ethnic groups would gratefully form themselves into a bicameral parliamentary democracy after enjoying a couple of months of bombardment. It took us several hundred years and a civil war so why should we assume it will be easier for other nations or even that it would be the best thing for them to do? One size rarely fits all.
Good use is made of sound effects and a video wall backdrop on the Cottesloe stage to conjure the frenetic excitement of election fever and, so slick are the skilful transitions between moods, times and places, it seems obvious that Charman’s play would move seamlessly from stage to screen.
Anna Chancellor gives a brittle, engaging performance as Fiona whose passion and conviction are both her great strength and Achilles heel. She makes Fiona a lonely figure whose work has expanded to fill the growing gaps in her personal life and left her with a surplus of passion to pour into her mission. The problem is that observers should, by very definition, be dispassionate.
