Jonathan Coe’s satirical novel about the venality of the Thatcher era, refracted through the “naked, clawing, brutish greed” of the upper-class Winshaw family, does not lend itself to easy adaptation. Stretching across 500 pages and encompassing enough generations to warrant a Tolstoyan family tree at the start, its tricksy postmodernism makes it even harder to translate for the stage.
But not for playwright Henry Filloux-Bennett, evidently, who gives us less an adaptation and more a reimagining, as gripping and accomplished an online play as it is audacious in its vision.
Where the 1994 novel began during the second world war and took us through the 1980s, up to the Iraq war, and culminated in a country house bloodbath, this fantastically ingenious version turns the chronology of the novel on its head.
We begin with the murders and work our way back in the style of a true-crime drama or investigative documentary that splices interviews with the last remaining Winshaw (Josephine, played with glittering satire by Fiona Button) alongside photos, film excerpts, radio and TV broadcasts, the words of police officers and private investigators. It all becomes a postmodern palimpsest of sources as rich and mischievous as the novel, but also its own discrete creation.
Coe’s writer-narrator, Michael Owen, travelled through the book unearthing the corrupt connective tissue between the Winshaws and bigger, darker politics (from secret allegiances to the Nazis to pacts with Saddam Hussein). Filloux-Bennett has replaced him with his own additional character – Michael’s disarmingly nice son, Raymond (Alfred Enoch), who delivers the story as it is being constructed: “It’s been 30 years since my father murdered them [the Winshaws]. Or was he framed?”
Veering far from a faithful adaptation, the script manages to distil the spirit of the original story while blazing with its own imagination. Its “true crime” concept carries the full weight of the mystery, but updates it to build an engrossing, contemporary whodunnit.
A co-production between The Barn theatre in Cirencester, the Lawrence Batley theatre in Huddersfield and the New Wolsey theatre in Ipswich, the various parts were recorded remotely by cast members, but under Tamara Harvey’s excellent direction there is no join at the seams.
Much of the starry cast – from Derek Jacobi to Stephen Fry, Griff Rhys Jones and Sharon D Clarke – does not appear in person, but we recognise their voices. A highlight among those we do see is Tamzin Outhwaite’s gimlet-eyed journalist embroiled in a TV interview with Button’s outrageously offensive Josephine Winshaw-Eaves, and their exchanges offer sheer comic delight.
As a 1980s state-of the-nation story, What a Carve Up! should feel more dated, but as Coe himself reflects, “… unfortunately its political satire seems as relevant as ever”. Filloux-Bennett gives it added punch, some of it heavy handed, from mentions of Dominic Cummings and Netflix to Covid-19.
The best of this come wrapped in satire, such as Josephine’s pro-Trump slogan T-shirt that reads: “Pussies for Trump. Let’s grab four more years.” Suddenly, the Winshaws seem alive and well again, living in our own venal age.
• What a Carve Up! runs until 29 November.
