The Statesman review – when laughter is outlawed, one man is forced to teach it
★★★★☆ Inventive, unsettling, and performed with real bite.
What happens when laughter is outlawed? Joel Marlin’s The Statesman drops us into a village where a chuckle can get you exiled, and a governor with medals clinking across his chest fears giggles more than insurrection. It sounds like Pythonesque whimsy, but Quentin Beroud directs it as a stern fable.
We meet Peter (David Fielder): long silver hair, stretched cardigan gone bobbly, green wellies, broom in hand — just an old man sweeping the streets, pushed to the margins of a village where laughter is banned. Minutes later, he returns with a book and a candle; the flame lights his face and the page, and – yes – he laughs. Horror ripples through the village. One villager peeks inside, infected at once by the laugh, and is marched out of town under guard in the dead of night. “We do not laugh around here!” barks a guard. “That doesn’t mean you’re not hilarious,” comes the reply. Bleak, daft, and barbed all at once.
Papaioannou’s design sketches a world of rigid blocks and civic geometry — an IKEA manual for how to assemble a state. Only one thing glows with life: Peter’s bookcase, stuffed with volumes that spill onto the floor like ideas too unruly to contain. Costumes do the rest: villagers are stern, old-fashioned, distinctly rural, as if they’ve stepped straight out of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Authority arrives in council blue and jangling decorations, puffed up like dictators awarding themselves victories. Then the Queen (Rosie Armstrong) sweeps in: part Elizabeth I — a Darnley portrait come to life in gold skirts and stiff collar — and part Tenniel’s Queen of Hearts, scarlet wig and crinoline to match. But unlike Carroll’s tyrant forever bellowing “Off with their heads!”, this Queen wants something different: to know if her subjects can laugh, and to restore it if not.
The play deepens in an early confrontation — one that seems, at first, like a clash between two ideologies. The Governor (Paul Westwood) storms into Peter’s home and threatens to burn the books unless he agrees to help stage fake laughter and forced cheer — a surreal rehearsal for the Queen’s upcoming visit. But then the truth lands: Peter is not just another subject. He is the Governor’s father. The man raised on books and memory now demands performance and obedience from the one who gave him life.
Knowledge, the scene suggests, can be wasted on some — or twisted into power’s service. After the heated clash and its humiliating demands, Peter lies on a bench, clutching his books like scripture, his face caught in a shaft of light — a small Caravaggio of censorship, capturing the desperation of a father whose memories mean nothing to a son already intoxicated by command, and the loss of hope that comes when wisdom is met not with curiosity but with fear.
The Statesman in rehearsals. Photos by Mark Senior.
From there Peter is pressed into coaching the village ahead of the royal inspection. Lessons follow: villagers line up like RADA students, forcing laughs one after another. But instead of joy, his efforts earn him tomatoes in the face, a stone through the window, and even a kidnapping — bundled away by neighbours who hope to keep him out of sight while they bluff the Queen. When she finally demands proof that her subjects can laugh, the villagers deliver something that feels like a poorly prompted AI routine: uncanny, reference-stuffed, entirely humourless. The first honest laugh comes almost by accident, when someone pulls out a battered clown nose with glasses and moustache from the props — a silly trinket that sparks a small, genuine chuckle.
Beroud makes the most of the space. With the audience banked on two sides, no more than five rows deep, the actors often spill into the aisles. You’re close enough to smell the candle wax and dodge the metaphorical tomatoes. The stripped-back staging — schematic blocks, white walls, rigid lines — underscores the village’s sterility, while the proximity brings the audience into the absurd tension. And Theatro Technis, tucked just up from Mornington Crescent, adds its own intimacy: after curtain call, the cast mingle in the foyer-bar, where the newly legalised laughter carries easily over a glass.
Fielder is the production’s anchor: a candlelit soul, lying on his bench or stooped over his broom, who carries the evening with weary dignity. His Peter feels less like a character than the memory of laughter itself, stubbornly refusing to be erased. Westwood’s Governor is more than a blusterer — beneath the bark sits fear, the kind that makes a man cling to medals as though they were proof of worth. Armstrong’s Queen is crucial: grotesque in design yet humane in action, she halts the bonfire, arrests the Governor, and offers Peter the City. It looks like a Promised Land for knowledge — a place where books are read in the open and laughter can breathe. The doubt is unavoidable: does she truly mean to honour his wisdom for the good of her people, or is power, almost by reflex, folding him into its propaganda engine, his laughter repurposed as policy?
Marlin, who grew up in small-town Ohio before carving out a career in New York, once taught in schools where he had to project authority while quietly leaning on playfullness to keep the classroom on his side. That experience seems to be folded into Peter’s reluctant tutorials, where “teaching” laughter proves as impossible as grading delight.
The Statesman isn’t the funniest night in London — but then, it doesn’t try to be. The uneasiest laugh comes last, when we realise how fragile joy is once power decides to regulate it.
★★★★☆ Inventive, unsettling, and performed with real bite.
The Statesman
Venue: Theatro Technis, 26 Crowndale Rd, London NW1 1TT
Dates:10–13, 15–20, 22–27 (including Saturday matinees) September 2025
Ticket link: https://www.
Elena Leo is the Arts & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
