A new play by Mike Leigh - hangdog auteur of Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy and Vera Drake - is opening at the National Theatre in a fortnight and has already sold out. It is billed, in suitably prosaic manner, as "A New Play by Mike Leigh", and no one has a clue about the work's subject matter beyond the solitary palm tree that features on the NT's promotional poster. Naturally, speculation as to what this enigmatic arboreal symbol might mean has been rife, but here are a few possibilities:
1) Brenda is the daughter of an exploited worker who lived and died among the colonial banana plantations of the old West Indies. She is mother to a large dysfunctional family employed in coconut husking and other menial professions. The clan are alarmed, one day, to receive an unexpected visitor - a young woman claiming to be Brenda's long-lost daughter. This revelation causes uproar among the family members, not only because the newcomer is white but, being middle class, she has never toiled in a banana/coconut/palm tree-related industry. Just as the ferment threatens to split them apart, Timothy Spall arrives to blame it all on Thatcher. Everybody coexists peacefully thereafter.
2) A celebrated musical duo, whose fame once spread across the entire Arabian peninsula on the strength of their inventive and witty belly dancing extravaganzas, have fallen on hard times. After collaborating successfully for decades, their slump in form means they are about to split until Timothy Spall arrives to inform them that their theatrical scenarios, set beneath the waving date palms, are now considered terribly passé and that they should look east for inspiration. Blaming Thatcher for developing an economy based solely on a restrictive palm-based monoculture, they follow Spall's advice and find success with a belly-dancing extravaganza set beneath the waving bonsai of Hokkaido.
3) Vera Duckworth has been doing very nicely through her work-from-home fertility service, which she bases on the application of therapeutic unctions derived from oil of coconut, banana, date and anything else that may or may not grow on palm trees. Her world of benign infanticide collapses violently around her when Thatcher suddenly slaps a 50-pence-in-the-pound tax on all palm-related products, leaving Vera in penury and, eventually, in jail. Astonishingly, Timothy Spall does not arrive.
Interested parties will have to wait until September 8 to learn which scenario most closely matches the storyline of Leigh's completed opus. Alternatively, it might just be about Iraq.
