Iconic is a word the meaning of which is moving from the religious world into popular culture – win a reality TV show dressed as a teapot, and you can be sure that your 15 minutes of fame will be labelled iconic across social media. Not quite what Andrei Rublev had in mind 600 years ago.
That said, few would deny that descriptor to the London Underground Map, not just a highly effective tool to navigate an ever-more complicated city, but perhaps the symbol of the metropolis. For something so ubiquitous and so useful, it is a surprisingly abstract work, owing more to Mondrian than Mercator, unusual in a country generally dubious about modern art.
The Truth About Harry Beck tells the tale of the man who had the vision to see that geography should give way to topology and then showed the determination to see the job through, innovation butting up against bureaucracy’s innate conservatism.
If that makes Andy Burden’s new play sound like another lonely genius going full Steve Jobs to change the world, you would only be half-right. Simon Snashall (pictured above with Ashley Christmas) lends the protagonist a nerdy, obsessive quality, poring over his diagrams (not maps!) refining and refining its aesthetics and adding new lines and new stations from the Thirties through to the Sixties. But Beck likes a bad pun and a chuckle – like many an Englishman born in 1902, he recognised his good fortune in missing the First World War – so can't quite don the cloak of the tortured artist.
Burden finds plenty of opportunities for whimsy in Beck's humorous exchanges with Ashley Christmas, who plays Harry’s long-suffering wife, Nora, and also a range of middle managers who sometimes support and sometimes obstruct the adoption of his celebrated circuit-board based schematic. Both actors bring warmth to their work.
This is no in-depth psychological study of a misunderstood man nor a long-overdue tribute to a neglected hero who died unheralded in poverty, since neither cliche was true of Beck, though he certainly ought to have had greater recognition in his lifetime. The tone is often light, the fourth wall broken continually, a bravura scene with ribbons delivered as part-pantomime, part-Magnus Pyke comic stylings. That tone makes a late, somewhat unwelcome, shift to a darker hue as marital difficulties surface - sure it rounds out both Mr and Mrs Beck’s characters, but it feels like it has been imported from another play and adds an unnecessary 15 minutes or so on to a two-hander that is otherwise suitably brisk.
There’s much more to be said about Harry Beck's time at London Transport and about the interface between art, information and the public, but that’s not really what this show is about, as it’s much more a truth than the truth. Settle in for a nostalgic, gentle, terribly English, play and, in the time it takes to go from Cockfosters to Heathrow Terminal Five, you’ll laugh, you'll smile and you'll reflect on a simpler age.
Okay, let’s load up tfl.gov.uk and check whether it’s quicker to walk to Leicester Square and change at Kennington or go Covent Garden – Green Park – Stockwell.
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