THE PERILS OF PC, THE TERROR OF TWITTER
This little theatre is on a roll, catching topicalities as they fly. After David Henry Hwang’s wonderful CHINGLISH. about trade with China, this play by Chris England is the ultimate British mediaclass, middleclass, middle-aged nightmare. As such it is, of course, enjoyably vicious on every level. It was time that both social media pieties and the snarky, jokes-are-sacred comedi-ocracy both got a good slapping-about, and here it is. England’s tale, performed with frighteningly recognizable accuracy and directed with glee by Jonathan Guy Lewis, is about a Twitterstorm: the contumely that falls with tedious regularity on public figures who step out of line in a world whose hobby is taking offence.
Screens overhead give us arch or vapid tweets, and then a blast of “Arguing the Toss”, a TV comedy chat-show halfway between Piers Morgan and Charlie Brooker: all sarky superiority and scripted gags. Below it, in a smart urban kitchen, meet its host Guy, our pleasingly dislikeable hero. Jason Merrells gets him to the last detail: a man forever hovering between sincerely felt grumpiness and tiresome auto-banter (he’s the kind of man who calls his patio barbie “the Klaus”). His sweet-natured charity-supporting wife Bex writes chick-lit novels he despises, and has a direct debit to sponsor a “Child 4 Africa”. They are suppressing their post-Christian smugness to schmooze their child into a faith school . Oh yes: the only thing missing on Anthony Lamble’s set is an unread Guardian.
Like all propsperous bien-pensants they have serfs. Lumbering amongst them in Lycra, having cycled miles every day to write Guy’s jokes for him, is Justin Edwards as Guy’s old pal Neil, who the star and his manager secretly plan to dump. The pair used to do fringe shows together as “The Potato People” – very Edinburgh – and now Neil just writes Guy’s endearing daily tweets to reinforce the brand. But a stranger comes to the door, a cuckoo in the nest not unconnected to Bex’s charitable direct-debit. And a chain of events, driven largely by Guy’s own smug comedic persona, leads towards comeuppance.
Never mind exactly how. I won’t spoil a fun plot which tips over at the end into eventful improbability. . And which also reminds us, among other things, how thin the partitions are these days between comfy middle England and Africa’s failing states. There are masses of one-line jokes of suitable tastelessness, an artful navigation round the n-word (never spoken) and a rare banana-skin moment which does not even involve taking the skin off the banana. There is also a nice moral turnaround, as PC rage implodes and eats its own backside. And there’s a beautiful, deadpan, deliciously hateable star turn by Ben Kavanagh as a gender-fluid ponytailed PC smugatron with a video blog.
The performances are beautifully judged all round: whether in the moment when Guy’s cool-dude persona slips into unadmitted middle age as he has to peer, without reading-glasses, at the unfolding twitstorm on someone else’s phone, or in the body language of Justin Edwards’ amiably hapless Neil or Claire Goose’s patient appalled Bex. The author himself plays the horrified agent.
But most of all I loved Tom Moutchi as Ike the interloper, all African openness and an impoverished dignity calculated to spread unease. It is necessary that we should never be quite sure whether his innocence is real or not: Moutchi carries this manner off with delicate mischief. Apparently he is an instagram star himself among under-25s, but I don’t see why they should get all the fun. So I am looking him up.
box office 0207 870 6876 to 1 July
rating four 
theatreCat 