Review Beast

Peter Barker enjoys an ambitious and energetic production where the workplace becomes a battlefield.

Beast
by Mariko Primarolo

Work Is A Drug
http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/show/beast

Banners Corporation is marketing a new product, an emotion-manipulating drug  treating soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress, especially after service in wars overseas.

Yet, according to the marketing, it has wider applications, for the liquid appears to calm and to concentrate the mind wonderfully

Invevitably though, there are other less desirable side effects.

This is the intriguing premise of Southwark Playhouse Young Company's latest offering at the South London venue.

Playwright Mariko Primarolo combines this plot with another analysing the competitive nature of modern-day internships.

Banners recruits four interns but only promises to give one of them a permanent job. For many in the Millenials' generation now, this is certainly not an exaggeration but reality.

Beast is performed energetically, directed by Chelsea Walker in a vibrant but unfocussed production.

At its best, it is a wry, sharply-observed and trenchant look at corporate culture and marketing where there is often an inextricable link between the office and bullshit.

In truth, while the problem has become magnified for graduates and others in today's economy, there is an honourable tradition of plays in previous generations making the same kind of points as Primarolo about young people's employment.

For example John Biyrne's examination of apprentices, The Slab Boys, written in the 1970s but hearking back, even if it was an era of full employment, two decades before that.

Despite Beast's initial good, clear idea, the play and production need more crafting as the switching back and forth between individual story lines feels awkward and are hard to follow.

The writer's promise to "enable everyone in the company to showcase their talents", while an admirable intention, leads to a muddled overall dramatic arc. Director Walker could have done with pacing the play in a more nuanced way.

There's plenty of talent on show, particularly Olive Supple-Still as intern Max, and the cast as a whole works well together. There are highlights - notably when the disgruntled workforce mutinies against the management

while the production does sometimes lose its way, there's certainly value in seeing it before the last performance on July 29 and enough in it to make an amber light.

Review Low Level Panic

Low Level Panic
by Claire McIntyre

The Order Of The Bath
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

Ah, 1988 ...  when Kraft was cheese and Heinz was beanz and never the twain would meet. A merger was arranged between breakaway Social Democrat and the Liberal Party. Margaret Thatcher was on the throne in office. Topless Page Three girls still boosted sales of The Sun newspapers. Comic Relief launched Red Nose Day on TV. The church was discussing the possibility of female vicars. Kids and adults were gripped by the video game craze.

And Clare McIntyre's curious collage of a play Low Level Panic was first performed at The Royal Court.

The play ostensibly covers  a night and a day in the life of three young women. A comedy drama,  part soap gone radical, probably influenced by Nancy Friday's influential tome My Secret Garden on women's sexual fantasies, and a nexus for a cocktail of 1980s' pressures, personal, political and commercial contradictions. 

In a well-paced and nuanced revival, the entire play is set in the bathroom of an all-female house-share. Rosanna Vize's clever four-cornered design, complete with avocado bath, toilet, free-standing door and vertical neon lit rails rising like outsize towel racks to the ceiling, gives director Chelsea Walker and movement director Ita O'Brien enormous flexibility.

The play's opening coup de théâtre still makes a - ahem - splash. Plumpish and shaggy-permed Jo (Katherine Pearce) and her more intense slim blonde housemate Mary (Sophie Melville) are relaxing in the bathroom. Mary, cigarette in hand, is perched on the toilet cistern at an open window. And Jo is starkers, naturally, as she's soaking in the bath using all the hot water.

Jo is also baring all as regards her fantasies laced with Hollywood-, pop video- and advertising-style luxury where the body, upmarket cars and sexual partners she yearns for are perfect specimens of the human race. All of which falls away when she mounts the scales.

While demure and groomed Celia (Samantha Pearl)  could either be a beautician or have just stepped out of a beauty parlour complete with an array of beauty products. The main strand of the plot follows Mary, the only one whose career we glimpse freeing herself from the shackles of a past sexual assault.

In spite of this, there are a fair amount of laughs - some things never change for women and in house-share bathrooms ;). There's some terrific dialogue between the women and the embarassment of parties rings true. But the monologues, despite the best efforts of sound designer Richard Hamarton and lighting designer Elliot Griggs to create a separate psychic space, do feel clunky.

It's a slick production and it struck us maybe back in 1988, it was a little more raw and makeshift. Still, the issues raised of body image and the use and abuse of women sexually in the global marketplace are still with us.

So there's plenty to reflect on and some very ingenious staging by Walker. Certainly at 80 minutes, it's a play well worth seeing without outstaying its welcome and its an upper range amber light from TLT and her own little luxury limousine.