Showing @ The Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh until Sun 24 Aug (not 11) @ 16:05
Can anyone under 60 remember Jane Fonda, let alone the Vietnam War which so polarised American public opinion? We now have newer and more urgent confrontations in Syria and Gaza. There is a truly great play here screaming to get out – or maybe a great movie. This new drama stars Oscar-nominated Anne Archer and is written and directed by her husband, Emmy-winning producer/director Terry Jastrow.
This is a high concept ‘encounter group’ as Jane Fonda (the Angelina Jolie of her day) comes face-to-face with Vietnam veterans 15 years after she, as a twenty-something idealist, went to Vietnam in an act of solidarity with the oppressed in an unjust war and used her profile to highlight atrocities (sound familiar?)
Nearly 60,000 American military personnel were killed in Vietnam. Was the war a construct of the US military-industrial complex or just the usual interventionism? When Fonda was famously photographed on a Vietcong military site, she was labelled a traitor by Vietnam veterans. Her meeting with 40 vets (onstage there’s only a handful) saw her apologise unreservedly for the hurt she caused.
There is little sense here of the ingenue Fonda and the cause for her change of opinion, and although Archer captures the star’s steely graciousness she is too self-contained in the part. The play’s narrative is ‘advanced’ with video clips which means dramatic kiss of death. What was required was sturm und drang rather than a group hug. This wants to be is a big-screen political biopic like Frost/Nixon where the story can be opened out and be punctuated with exploding helicopters. Billy Bob Thornton could play one of the grizzled vets and as Fonda? Why not Angelina?