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Dir: Roger Michell.
Cast: Pippa Haywood, Tom Hollander, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Jason Watkins
Description: A technological scientist endeavours to resist the weapons industry, after his new and startling military technology is literally fought for by the Ministry of Defence. New drama by Joe Penhall.
Trains: Tube/BR: Waterloo 
Phone: 0207452 3000
Website: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Riveting: Tom Hollander plays weapons designer Ned
Joe Penhall requires far too much suspending of disbelief and doubt-swallowing in his adventurous new play about the moral responsibility of the scientist - in this case a weapons designer - or is it moral irresponsibility?
As in Blue/Orange, Penhall's enthralling drama about mental illness, the author adopts a dialectic form: once initial blokeish banter is done with, Penhall fashions a series of hammer versus tongs debates, with the arguments heavily loaded against new weapons.
Director Roger Michell, who staged Blue/Orange as if in a boxing ring, presents Penhall's latest play in a dynamically acted traverse production that emphasises its confrontational nature.
Ned, a youngish British weapons designer, rivetingly portrayed by Tom Hollander as an isolated neurotic teetering on the verge of a breakdown with his intellectual convictions shot to pieces, imagines his creation can remain his own "intellectual property".
Since the invention in question, a new form of self-navigating flying robot, with weaponry attached, is being part-funded by the Ministry of Defence and the Americans, it beggars belief that Ned would ever imagine that he, or the company he works for, had any chance of keeping control of it.
He likens his f lying robots to "a symphony in the sky". It takes his entrepreneurial dentist brother, well played by Julian Rhind-Tutt with a bracing air of exasperation and outrage, to make Ned appreciate that his invention could become a weapon of mass destruction. How easily he quashes Ned's feeble argument that his invention will serve Britain well if world war breaks out.
This master of weapons design proves a vacillating victim, prone to moral uncertainty. It is as if Penhall were implying that Ned's genius left him blind to the world of Realpolitik. He first takes Dan's advice and refuses to sign the contract giving him limited control over his intellectual property, is then prevailed upon by Jason Watkins's menacing spook to reverse his decision, before throwing a spanner in the works of his own creation.
A remarkable Tom Hollander conveys such a sense of emotional turmoil and disintegration, as Ned lapses into unshaven lethargy, that Landscape with Weapon becomes more a portrait of the scientist as a poetic, escapist dreamer than a debate about ethics or a world in which weapons are dangerous, big business.
Booking to 7 June (020 7452 3000).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Landscape With Weapons was absolutely the best. Thought provoking and morally intriguing. The cast were totally believable, Tom Hollander made me cry and Julien Rhind Tutt made me laugh, what more does anyone want from a play. Joe Penhall has a mind that I would like to interrogate and if I can say it has changed at least one person's opinions forever mine.
- Kim Hudson, Wordsley, West Midlands
Blue/Orange is not about "mental illness" it is about struggle for dominace. That is one reason it was staged in a boxing ring.
- Harold A. Maio, Ft Myers FL US
