Within the dystopia and deceit, A Mirror asks a confronting question, who decides what art is or isn’t? Why can’t art be utterly truthful?

Pastel coloured balloons, pretty streamers, and an order of service. Take your seats, the ceremony will begin in 2 minutes; you are invited to the wedding Leyla and Joel. That is the main deceit of Sam Holcroft’s A Mirror, a mischievous, stark and powerful play concerned with censorship, corruption, who decides what art is, and the place of reality in it. 

We are invited to stand, to pledge allegiance to the state and enjoy the wedding of two young lovers; that is until the authorities are satisfied and leave. Then the play begins, but denied a permit by the ministry of culture, the guise of the wedding must remain on the surface. Actors playing actors, the marriage officiator becomes the ostentatious Čelik (Jonny Lee Miller), Ministry of Culture director, known colloquially as the censorship bureau. Along with timid junior Mei (Tanya Reynolds), Čelik hopes to mould the promising young Adem (Samuel Adewunmi) into a playwright acceptable to the state. Enlisting the help of arrogant yet depleted national treasure Bax, they encourage Adem away from true stories of prostitutes and poverty into something ‘uplifting, hopeful’. But Adem’s proclivity to writing verbatim conversations, and stark truths, affront Čelik’s world view entirely. At any moment, a knock on the door could mean the authorities, and just as quickly the play is halted, the audience become congregation, the actors start playing role of wedding party.  

Jonny Lee Miller makes for an excellent Čelik, pontificating, preaching, and turning in circles to absolve his complicity in censorship as compromise, turning prose into instruction on what ‘art’ is and isn’t. Miller’s phrases are laden with biting meaning, a captivating portrayal. All performers give delightful dimension to the complex characters, at each moment adding layers and hints as to the secondary (and even tertiary) storylines and truths hidden in the play within a play, within another play, at times. Tanya Reynolds particularly, oscillates from the meek Mei to biting lines of Shakespeare without a hitch. When the penny drops at the plays satisfying twist, the stakes of the underground performance, the existence of survival of art itself becomes startingly and powerfully apparent among the layers of plot. 

Surprisingly, despite the subject matter, the laughs are plentiful, if edged with a macarbre tone. It’s quietly clever and not artificial, the artful deceit played on the audience avoiding becoming tiresome. It’s balanced beautifully, Herrin’s direction adding the urgency of the clandestine meeting of players and audience, the content ever more impactful because of it.

But within the dystopia and deceit A Mirror asks a confronting question, who decides what art is and isn’t? Why can’t art be utterly truthful? Who decides either way? Are we the audience – of both the marriage, the clandestine secret production and us sat in the Trafalgar Theatre seats –  merely the puffed up privileged set to be entertained then leave, expressing meaningless opinions and pontificating on arts purpose, just like Čelik. Or are we the powerful audience, that the Ministry of Culture fears and thus censors, that quickly takes a story, turns it into a protest and quickly into a mob?