The Low Road By Bruce Norris

Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs Ends 11 May 2013 Tel. 020 7565 5000   The play opens in New England in 1759, the same year that Voltaire’s Candide was published. Ten years earlier, Henry Fielding penned his comic novel, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.    Whereas Candide was an optimistic young man, whose is taught by his tutor Pangloss that  ‘all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds’, and Tom an affable, good-natured lad making his way in the world, Norris’s protagonist, Jim Trumpett, is a spiteful, conniving, deceitful, dishonest, bigoted and murderous chancer. All three are bastards, but Trumpett is a right royal bastard. We watch him grow up, under the watchful eye of Adam Smith, the Scottish moral philosopher, political economist and one of the leading lights of the Scottish Enlightenment, who is our narrator for the evening, played with chuckling bemusement by Bill Patterson.   Trumpett soon learns the rudiments ...