James R | On 18, Nov 2021

“I don’t have survivor’s guilt. I have survivor’s outrage.” Those are the words of Ralph Fiennes in Beat the Devil, David Hare’s sellout stage play. Performed last year at the Bridge Theatre, the one-man show was the result of Hare’s own brush with Covid-19, which he caught on the day that the first lockdown was announced in England. It doesn’t sound like light viewing, and it isn’t – and it’s all the better for it.

Hare is no stranger to the screen as well as stage – he recently penned BBC thriller Roadkill – and he translates his monologue into a 50-minute piece of TV with an effective simplicity. We follow Fiennes’ stand-in for Hare around his home, making tea, resting and attempting to write. While the play takes us through the feverish highs and despairing lows of the virus, there’s no doubting Hare’s lucid penmanship, which skewers fear and delirium with a political acumen that’s painfully sharp. He talks evocatively of how everything tastes like sewage in his mouth but is no less eloquent in his blunt criticisms of the government’s attempts to handle the pandemic – pointing out legal corruption as much as moral failures, from PPE shortages and contracts to the decision not to implement a lockdown until too late, particularly for Hare.

Fiennes delivers it all with the gravitas and blistering deadpan that you’d expect, never raising his voice but never leaving us in any doubt as to how angry he is – at times he spits more than speaks, delivering his lines directly to camera without descending into contrived melodrama. The only challenge Beat the Devil faces is that this fourth wall-breaking dissection of the personal and national consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic have already been cinema ended with more variety by Dennis Kelly’s similar two-hander Together for BBC Two. But as the country attempts to move on from a pandemic that is still far from over, Beat the Devil is a powerful, human reminder of how bad things have been and can get. It stands alongside Channel 4’s Help as a drama that definitely doesn’t sell out.

 

Best the Devil is available on Sky Arts. Don’t have Sky? You can also stream it on NOW, for £9.99 a month with no contract. For the latest Sky TV packages and prices, click the button below.

 

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