Proving Mr. Jennings
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You’d think that a British play about the extreme measures that government and military officials take when it comes to Al Qaeda operatives might offer some insights into this new, urgent reality. But James Walker’s quasi-Orwellian Proving Mr. Jennings does nothing of the sort. Though it won the 2004 King’s Cross New Writing Award, like Guantanamo–the other 2004 smash hit from Britain about terrorism–it offers unassailable, well-worn gripes instead of meaningful satire. At least Guantanamo had a certain documentary value, consisting entirely of the verbatim interviews that novelist Gillian Slovo and journalist Victoria Brittain conducted with people embroiled in the human rights quagmire at the infamous detention center. Walker, who’s now 26, has merely produced a muddled, overwrought fantasy.
In the lengthy first scene, 40-ish attorney Allen Jennings checks in to a hospital for a heart transplant only to find that his nymphomaniac nurse is a pill popper with no medical training. There’s blood on the gown he’s given to wear, and his health screening includes questions like “Have you ever participated in genocide?” and “Are you a member of any banned groups?” The play’s awkward mix of The Benny Hill Show and Franz Kafka takes a darker turn in the second scene, when Jennings wakes up from his operation in some sort of military barrack. There he gets the news that finally sets the play in motion: a chilly doctor tells him tersely that the surgeon found a bomb where Jennings’s heart should have been, and Jennings has been arrested as a terrorist.
