TheatreReviewLyric Hammersmith, London
Market forces rule in Sean Holmes’s calculating post-crash revival, where everything comes at a price – and the cast even sell off seat upgrades
The emphasis is on the first word in the title in Sean Holmes’s 20th-anniversary revival of Mark Ravenhill’s fearless dark comedy about heroin addict Mark (Sam Spruell) and his flatmates Lulu (Sophie Wu) and Robbie (Alex Arnold). They come to understand that everything has a price, through their encounters with young Gary (David Moorst) who has been so emotionally and physically abused by his stepfather that he wants to be owned, and a seedy porn and drugs merchant (Ashley McGuire) who demands money with menaces when Robbie gives away £3,000 worth of ecstasy to anyone good-looking who asks.
Even before the show has begun, the selling is in full swing, as the cast themselves flog off merchandise and the chance for audience members to sit in premium seats. The actors’ clothes sport price tags reminding that we live in a world where everyone can be bought and sold. Jon Bausor and Tal Rosner’s frenzied design, full of flashing signs proclaiming special offers, relocates Ravenhill’s flatshare drama, in which the characters’ names offer a nod to the manufactured pop band Take That to a more recognisably 21st-century world of TV shopping channels and internet porn. It both plays to a new generation’s savviness in knowing that everyone is trying to sell them something, and sadness that they are duped over and over. Gary arrives in a cardboard box, like an Amazon delivery.
Ravenhill’s play is both distinctly of its time, in the way it skewered the bleakness of Thatcher’s legacy on a generation of youngsters, and yet also prophetic. It neatly reflects the anxieties and monetary obsessions of youngsters living in a post-financial crash world where you are what you own; where even intimacy comes at a terrible price or must be avoided at all costs; and where loneliness is corrosive. “Are there any feelings left?” muses Mark on his odyssey in which he tries to reduce everything to a transaction only to discover that love gets in the way.
There is a bleak logic in Ravenhill’s vision of a world and culture devalued, when everything is reduced to a transaction, so even love becomes brutalised. But there’s also a compassion for these unhappy drifters who have lost the thread of their own stories and who are tossed hither and thither by market forces. The play is rich in cultural allusions and one of the best scenes sees Wu’s Lulu, desperate for a job, stripping while spouting Chekhov for an employer who weeps at children playing classical music and employs a power drill on those who owe money.
Holmes’s production is a little too calculating and has a touch too much of the Flash Harry about it to allow room for you to really feel for the characters or allow the comedy to surface. For all the many pleasures of Ashley McGuire’s performance –dressed in white like a particularly menacing TV evangelist – it sometimes feels as if the devil has been allowed the most entertaining tunes.
- At the Lyric, Hammersmith, until 5 November. Box office: 020-8741 6850.
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