WHEN THE VIRTUE-SIGNALS DRIVE YOU OFF THE RAILS
In a boutique restaurant going bankrupt, Jacq and Kas nervously prepare to admit it to their main investor Tobin and his wife Adaego. Kas – least confident of the four and likewise less mad – wants to apologize and pay Tobin back: the four are longstanding friends since university so it’s awkward. Kas also wants to marry Jacq, androgynous and too cool for such bourgeois nonsense. He has spent the years since university learning about wine, she training as a chef.
One thing it is safe to say about this preposterous new four-hande is that Deborah Frances-White has written a hell of a good part for Greg Wise. Not that the others don’t have their shining moments, but there is most glory in Tobin, a City wealth-manager who trumpets his work as “Ethicapitalism” and prides himself on being too woke to use the word ‘woke” because it’s African-American : cultural appropriation, see? . He refused a Ted Talk offer because hey, “straight white men have said enough.. if I’m talking, I’m not learning”. Wise is master of the shrug, the self-deprecating grin and subtle eyebrow work: to him the 120k lost investment is just “fun money” . He rides a Ducati because Uber is exploitative, and announces that he is the best socialist in the room because “I fund things”, out of taxes.
It is a festival of competitive virtue-signalling and victimhood. Adaego, played with extreme shoutiness by Susan Wokoma, is a feminist networker and person of colour, ready to leap on any wrongspeak. Jacq is bisexual and therefore claims the protected characteristic of “queer”, as well as being Welsh working-class. Kas is a second-generation south Asian immigrant, though he keeps his powder dry for longer than the rest.
Anyway, the four of them get drunk, hideously so in a series of crashing vignettes of wild dancing, coke-sniffing, shots , and shrieky opinions , a period which director Emma Butler allows to go on for rather longer than necessary. Between that ,and a raucously young first- night audience shrieking with laughter at every other line, a sort of weariness descended towards the interval. Why hang out with a load of irritating kidults fighting over who is the most oppressed? . But then Kas suggests they play the confessional drinking game”never have I ever” and suddenly a fact from the past slips out.
It’s as banal a revelation as any university misdemeanour of that millennial age, flatmates high on MDMA, hormonal overload and libertarian sexual entitlement. But Tobin – who we now see more clearly as a bit older than them – becomes suddenly a very, very affronted and unwoke patriarch. He makes a demand for sexual revenge which echoes the oldest of tales , familiar from Chaucer to Indecent Proposal: purchasing-power in sexual relationships. The interest about what will happen sends us out in the interval with fresh hope..
That hope is , to some extent, fulfilled in the much better second half. Tobin now reckons he’s the innocent victim with treasurable lines emerge like . ” I respect women. Not just you, women I don’t HAVE to respect”. Everyone has something to rebuke the others with, from simple infidelity to racism, disloyal friendship or “making me feel fetishised”. Tobin is aggrieved because straight white men get blamed for all social ills. Everyone is furious and sometimes, thank God, also very funny. The question of what Jacq will do kindles a series of rows: Alex Roach comes properly to life in that role after a rather bland start, and Adaego grows more subtleties than she was allowed in the noisy first half. Though, given that she was an affluently raised pony -riding child and now is a rich banker’s wife with a vanity-freelance career, , there is mischief in having her harp on about being mistaken for a waitress – just once, ten years earlier – and insisting that for all her first-class flights and influential WhatsApp power she’s not over it yet.
For all the issues there is little sense of genuine, interested social analysis of a muddled generation, and you do wonder as an adult why after all that drunkenness, vomiting , more drinking and keen cocaine use, they don’t all just go to sleep and sort out their whining socio-political resentments over breakfast. But the real star of the second half is Amit Shah as Kas. Suddenly he, the peacemaker and the sanest of them all, is accused by Adaego of disloyalty to his person-of-colour status, by being a typical “good little immigrant”. He suddenly up on the table to deliver a devastating impromptu Ted talk about their empty self indulgence. There are better things to do on a troubled, threatened planet, he cries, than fighting over who has the best or worst deckchair on the Titanic. He then reveals something really, really terrible about his Brexit views.
I’d have stopped the play right there; but the psychosexual-psychosocial-financial issues of Tobin and Jacq have to be resolved. And after too much feminist angsting in the wine cellor, they are. And again Greg Wise is brilliant, demonstrating how you can lose while winning. Maybe he WAS the biggest victim, after all. I will look forward to finding out what , after a crowing, shrieking youthful first night audience, Chichester’s senior regulars make of this.
Box office cft.org.uk. To 30 sept
Rating three
theatreCat 