The Caffè Nero opposite King’s, famously a hotbed for Soviet sympathisers, was a surprisingly appropriate location to meet the directors and producers of 4000 Miles. This comic drama, written by Amy Herzog, explores the relationship between an elderly communist granny and her grandson. 4000 Miles was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and won Time Magazine’s #1 Play or Musical of 2012. This is not quite its British debut, but as Assistant Director Patrick Brooks puts it, “it is probably its amateur dramatic debut ... definitely in Cambridge at least!”

Director Matthew Lee (co-directing with David Rattigan) arguably has a lot to live up to. Is he worried? “Not really. Maybe that sounds arrogant – I don’t know – but I wouldn’t want to work with a bad play. I was one of the directors for Jerusalem last term, and obviously that has a huge following.” 

He is equally sanguine when I suggest there might be difficulties introducing an American comedy to Britain: “The writer is pretty sophisticated. We in Britain like to think of ourselves as having quite a sophisticated sense of humour.”

In fact Lee was surprised to find that the writing’s sophistication caused the most difficulty: “The closest thing I’ve done before is Chekhov: it was all about understanding the subtext. This play’s incredibly subtle; it’s a bit of a challenge when it comes to understanding the characters’s motivations.

“I’m very interested in inconsistency, causality, and creating an arc which resonates with the audience, and found you really need to work with this play to do that. I’ve really enjoyed it.”

All three agree that this emotional complexity is the central theme of the play. “Although you’ve got humor, you haven’t got characters who are in a happy place,” says Alex Cartlidge, the play’s producer.

Lee explains further: “The message is that there’s a way through loneliness and that the ability to form new relationships and accept that loneliness is a part of life and isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“So you have this 91-year-old grandmother who’s been lonely for the last few years of her life, but she’s the most stable of the characters. Then you have her grandson coming along, and she teaches him a lot about how to mature. How to be more like her, so he can deal with the problems he’s got now, and the problems he’s got to come.”

The play presents technical challenges, as Cartlidge is keen to emphasise: “The main thing for me would be for people to appreciate the way we are aiming to be as realistic as possible. We’re pushing the costumes as well. Attention to detail is key.”

The actors are working along similar lines: “Julia’s playing a woman 73 years older than her, and she’s as convincing as an 18 year-old playing a 91 year-old can be.”
4000 Miles’ politics are also complex. “Politics is one of the things that the grandmother and grandson bond over,” explains Lee. “Both partly buy into politics to express their identity. Leo lives an unconventional lifestyle.

“But for all Leo’s noble principles, he’s selfish, whereas his grandmother was a communist because it was a way of showing you cared about society. There’s a good quote about it in the play: ‘A lot of people were communists back then – it was like, it was like ... recycling, or whatever’.”

There is some social criticism in the play, which seems relevant to the students of today, who are often accused of having lost their social conscience: “For Leo life is easy enough that you can wear a political ideology in the way you dress, with badges and those sort of things, without it actually meaning much because there isn’t actually anything you have to fight for. Or the things we do have to fight for are so difficult or big that people don’t.

“Leo’s someone who needs to grow up, and getting a deeper understanding of politics is one way his character does grow up. He solves the dichotomy between the way he actually acts and what he says he will do.”

“They’re supposed to be taking down the communist flag by King’s, aren’t they,” Cartlidge points out, evidence of the slow death of student political culture. Brooks immediately recognises the perfect demographic: “If you come from King’s you must come see the play.”

Yet filing away the play as political does not do justice to its scope and depth. In Lee’s opinion, its main value is almost spiritual: “No matter how hard you think life is, it’s not as hard as you think it is. Life is quite liveable. Maybe in quite a Buddhist way, the play’s message is that people don’t have to suffer.”
“It’s very deep,” agrees Cartlidge. “We should have put that as a quote on the poster.”

4000 Miles runs at Corpus Playroom at 7pm from 21st-25th January