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. 
 

Review Luv

Luv
by Murray Schisgal

The Graduates
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

The spelling of Luv, according to the New York Times, as "luv" was popularised by New Yorker Murray Schisgal's 1963 manic lampoon on the vagaries of marriage, divorce, success and failure in life. So covering more or less - er - everything.

The play, first produced in London before opening to great acclaim in New York the following year, is a period piece, in its satire firmly rooted in the theatre scene of the 1950s and 1960s and the sensibility of "GI Bill" East Coast writers.

Two former college buddies meet fifteen years later by chance on Brooklyn Bridge. Time has not treated the once brilliant scholar, now desperate, dishevelled would-be suicide Harry (Charlie Dorfman) kindly. It seems life has see-sawed in favour of stockbroker Milton (Nick Barber).

However Milton, who is unhappily married and unable to divorce his wife to live with his lover, sees an opportunity amongst the trash and detritus of Harry's (single) life.

It's less murderous than the later comedy "Throw Momma From The Train" (based on Hitchcock's Strangers On the Train),  but Milton engineers a swap.  Milton, certain they will hit it off and marry, determines to (and does) transfer his wife Ellen (Elsie Bennett) to Harry.

Sure enough, his plan comes to fruition in the absurdist manner of the play which combines social and sociological satire using vaudeville and musical theatre tropes.

Luv turns out to be a rather quaint piece, in many ways an extended sketch, even if a bitter cyclical political and economic allegorical strain lies beneath,  It seems to be drawing on the same atmosphere as Cole Porter's Too Darn Hot  where The Kinsey Report, a sociological report on sexual behaviour, merited a mention in the lyrics.

Even so, while being thoroughly steeped in New York from the same pool as SJ Perelman,  Neil Simon and Woody Allen,  French intellectualism comes in as an equal runner in the parody stakes - in the shapely form of Ellen (name shortened to Elle), over-educated for a housewife but torn between a wish for motherhood and a career.

Set against Max Dorey's evocative backdrop with sunset sky and grey bridge girders, this is a play depending very much on sharp direction and the timing and talent for farce displayed by the three-strong cast.

Nicely stylized in both performance and costumes, and despite a short break owing to technical difficulties on press night, the attention to detail pays off.

Nick Barber's Milton changes from flatpack 1920s' jock to a more complex 1960s' creature. Meanwhile Charlie Dorfman manages to embody childlike Harry saved from drowning with deadpan physical humour.  Elsie Bennett as the put-upon Ellen turns from sneering fur-coated kept wife to Left Bank intellectual hottie with aplomb.

We can't pretend we didn't find this a determinist sketch stretched out to two acts, but it still held us all the way through. It's a curio of a play which is just as iconic of a cultural moment as The Graduate.

Yet as TV invaded the homes of citizens then, so we are now living in the age of the internet. There's still room for Luv to resonate in our computerized times and it's an upper range amber light from TLT.