Coup!

“The bells are ringing for me and my gal,” a big musical hit of the last years of the First World War, chimes out over the start of Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman’s fleet-footed Coup! as the Spanish Flu of 1918 turns a well-established world inside out. A man is seen shaving. He has a drink. There is a gun. He kisses the back of the head of a blond man in a chef’s uniform. “Influenza” shout the headlines on October 14, 1918.

Bodies are heaped onto wagons, people are wearing masks. It is time for Floyd Monk (Peter Sarsgaard) to leave the infested town and start a position as cook on the remote Egg Island at the seaside estate of wealthy journalist Jay Horton (Billy Magnussen), his wife Julie (Sarah Gadon) and their two young children, Molly (Willa Dunn) and Tom (Callum Vinson). More Americans lost their lives at home than overseas, due to the Spanish Flu epidemic at the time.

Soon the dynamics among the staff, led by Ms McMurray (Kristine Nielsen), with Kaan (Faran Tahir) and Ms Tidwell (Skye P Marshall), and the family begin to shift as convictions are being tested, lies and politics intermingle, and nothing seems to be the way it was before Mr Monk’s arrival.

Sarsgaard gears up his Floyd with a harmonica (worked beautifully into the score by Nathan Halpern) and a bullet choker necklace, as though he were Till Eulenspiegel with bells on his trickster cap, or the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who gets rid of your rats, but might take your children as well. Horton has a picture of George Bernard Shaw in his study, and is a vegetarian, just like him. Jay looks up to Upton Sinclair and is a pacifist, who chooses not to harm a bug when digging out a cauliflower for supper with his wife.

How it feels to take credit for something you haven’t done is one of the questions Coup! invites us to contemplate. Perfectly fine, seems to be the answer for many a scoundrel, but Jay, who shares his name with Gatsby (and lives on an island reminiscent of the West- and East Eggs in Fitzgerald’s novel) does have a conscience and certain convictions and a sense of shame. He is also proud and privileged and oblivious, which gives Magnussen’s portrayal for brief moments the aura of Helmut Berger in one or the other of his Visconti films. It also functions well as a reflector for Floyd, a vagabond, who is just as proud and dedicated to the cause of mixing things up by exploding old structures and exposing hypocrisy.

Sarah Gadon, who was wonderful as Emma Jung, CG Jung’s wife, in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, gives Julie a similar breadth of motivation. Her wants are vivid, her calculations hidden. She longs for a playfulness she experienced years ago in Paris, before becoming a wife and mother, and desperately wants to believe the men.

Meanwhile, Floyd’s realm is the folktale, the carnivalesque elements of a topsy-turvy world, and metamorphosis for a, in his mind, just cause. Although at times a bit too much of a scowling pirate, complete with earring and missing finger (its explanation, Austin Stark told me, ended up on the cutting room floor) who seems to know the future already, Floyd Monk is intriguing in his mystery. At one point in the satire, audiences may realise that they actually know nothing about what they thought they knew.

A phone call with Upton Sinclair, a lure from McClure’s magazine - as rules are rapidly being replaced by new rules, paranoia sets in. Though steeped in the past (“Willie” Randolph Hearst gets a shoutout and the APL, the American Protective League is in full swing) this coup, triggered by pandemic times and stark social divides, is just as much about what lies ahead.

An island perceived to be a safe place where the plague is kept away by water, turns into a man-made trap. At the heart of the Horton mansion is a stately pool, Jay’s pride and joy and his alone. “That swimming pool,” says Floyd “underneath it is an entire civilisation, and another one, and underneath that is a saber-toothed tiger.” Coup! shines the brightest when it is precise in its historical references and lets the parallels to today emerge organically.