In the shadow of the #MeToo movement, a new play dramatises the dark corners in a world of bright lights
GREAT music captures and records the most subtle and fleeting shades of human emotion. But if it is ever to reach an audience, the ineffable must not only be bottled. It must be packaged, labelled, copyrighted, advertised and finally sold for a profit—and all without losing the grain of emotional truth that made it so good in the first place. “Mood Music”, a new play by Joe Penhall (“Mindhunter”), stages the collision of emotion with tangled layers of producers, managers, lawyers and industry suits.
The play’s central duo of hit-making musicians, singer Cat (Seána Kerslake) and “artist-producer” Bernard (Ben Chaplin), are the twin poles of that contradiction. Cat is a young musical autodidact—both fiercely talented and plain old fierce—with an Irish accent more of a thwack than a lilt. If Cat’s talent is raw, the grizzled Bernard’s is over-cooked, soured by decades of disillusionment. Played by Mr Chaplin with anti-heroic verve, Bernard is the archetype of the self-aggrandising entertainment industry ogre. His cynicism extends to everyone and everything except his own knack for producing hit songs, which he platitudinously trumpets as a means for “bringing humanity together”. As opposites often do, however, Cat and Bernard have a volatile bond. It’s not about sex, she clarifies, but deeper things—their recording-studio alchemy, their troubled childhoods and drug abuse, and their defensive petulance towards authority.
Despite their interdependence, the relationship is far from equal. Bernard is a middle-aged white man, Cat a pretty young woman. They are seen by their industry as dominant and disposable, respectively. Despite his reminiscences about a punk-rock era when “you had to be angry to be authentic”, Bernard now sips Fiji water and votes Conservative. His psychotherapist asks him whether he has ever really liked a woman as a person; “Comme-ci comme-ça,” he spits in return. In one especially toe-curling scene, he interrupts Cat’s heartfelt acceptance of a song-writing award with lame gags and narcissistic microphone-hogging.
Under the direction of Roger Michell, Mr Penhall’s zippy script has a sketchy, provisional, rehearsal-room feel, enabling it quickly to cover considerable ground. The cognitive science of emotive music, the struggles of women in the entertainment industry, and the role of trauma in creativity are all touched upon (with varying degrees of thoughtfulness). Hildegard Bechtler’s set is unadorned, save for rows of studio microphones that hang oppressively from above, as if recording every word. When things go seriously wrong for Cat, however, it appears that no one is listening. From her murky, drug-hazed account of her American tour, a sordid picture emerges of exploitation and maltreatment, perpetrated by leering roadies and ignored by Bernard. In a further unedifying turn, Cat is compelled to use the threat of “going public” as leverage in a plagiarism dispute, enmeshing her with Bernard in a legal tangle of mutually assured destruction.
As much as the recent #MeToo movement, the plot alludes to a long, unpalatable history of female vocalists ill-treated by their producers and collaborators, from Billie Holiday in the 1940s to Amy Winehouse in the 2000s. In the week that “Mood Music” opened Cardi B, a ferociously talented rapper, was joined to an action for $10m by her former manager and mentor for defamation: she had complained that he had exploited her. Bernard never gets his #MeToo moment. He hires a new vocalist (and a new psychotherapist), and simply rock’n’rolls on as before. Cat, meanwhile, forced to choose between authentic empowerment and commercial success, is quietly dropped.
A story of an older man abusing his power over a younger artistic protégée is a pointed choice for the Old Vic, a theatre attempting to exorcise the alleged abuses of Kevin Spacey, its former artistic director. The play’s most chilling implication, though, is that for every public exposure, there are many more men like Bernard, inhabiting dark corners left unilluminated in a world of bright lights.