Ulster American review: Woody Harrelson charms in satire on privilege

Ulster American is at the Riverside Studios until the end of January

Ulster American review and star rating: ★★★

The cheapest Ulster American tickets on the website are going for £135, expensive ones £170 and the daily lottery for affordable seats is overrun by requests; it’s quite the event for the beleaguered Riverside Studios, which went into administration earlier this year. Why the hype? Woody Harrelson, hotter than ever after film awards season hype for the hilarious satire Triangle of Sadness, returns to the London stage to be, well, hilarious in a satire.

By the northern Irish playwright David Ireland, Ulster American is a take down of white privilege and an identity play about what it means to both British and Irish. Harrelson plays obnoxious American actor Jay Conway, who’s working with British director Leigh Carter, brought to rich and textured life by Andy Serkis. Derry Girls’ Louisa Harland rounds out the cast as the young Irish playwright whose unenviable job it is to work with both men on putting on her play after Conway decides her working class Protestant roots aren’t the type of Irish identity he is on board with.

Harrelson and Serkis, on stage together for almost two hours without an interval, are a joyous double act, clownishly nailing both the intense laughter and absolute darkness.

Harrelson looks so comfortable you’d imagine he’d spent his life treading the boards, but with dozens of famous film roles under his belt, the 62-year-old only has a handful of stage appearances to his name. He performs hand stands and convincing fight choreography, and gets proper laughs, without looking like he’s raised a sweat. There are parts where it feels as if director Jeremy Herrin has just said “Oh go on then” and let Harrelson stand and do funny things with his facial muscles, on stage alone, like some American transplant of Mr Bean. There is a scene with an eye patch where he cavorts around acting the fool and I could pull a sickie to watch him do just this alone. At points you feel as if he’s just clowning around out of character.

Serkis is arguably better, wearing his character’s anxiety and skittishness like it’s his own skin. Carter is also the more interesting role: self aware and believing he is truly morally upstanding, he becomes a total hypocrite when he realises his own beliefs may cause him a big upset at work.

It’s all good fun, with enough in the comedic performances to make this long act pass by without much of a second thought at the unusually long runtime. That’s not to say Ireland’s script is quite so polished as the performances: some of the jokes, like one about being as Irish as a potato famine, fall flat, and on the whole the plot feels a touch underpowered. Ireland raises some interesting questions, particularly about the malleability of men and their beliefs, especially around other men. But on balance there’s a little too much scene-setting and the plot drifts a little too comfortably along.

That is, until you get to the surprising final fifteen minutes when director Jeremy Herrin and fight director Renny Krupinksi introduce some aggression that is gripping and genuinely hard to watch, even if in parts it feels a tad A-Level drama.

There’s also a slightly uncomfortable irony about the tone: Ulster American is full to the brim with luvvie jokes about the theatre. At one point during a discussion about theatre critics, Harrelson’s Conway says “the only thing I want to read from a theatre critic is a suicide note.” The star-powered audience on opening night, which included Brian Cox and Stanley Tucci, were in hysterics. But for a play about systemic oppression against a working class woman at the hands of two privileged white men, there’s an irony to the fact that this play has clearly been written to specifically entertain privileged London theatre crowds.

Ulster American plays at the Riverside Studios until 27 January