Imagine London if things get much, much worse. The streets of central London are a third world crime zone, a bit like Travis Bickle's New York, where visiting American 'grockles' are hustled for their precious dollars by the people they contemptuously call 'the Brits', where unemployed philosophy professors sell toilet paper by the sheet outside the station lavatory and unemployed doctors turn to prostitution to make ends meet. The Waterloo Station Tourist Lounge is a relatively safe haven where tourist guide Jane shepherds her clients, telling them to hang on to their wallets and their luggage. Poor Michael, a visiting American doctor, tries his best but manages to lose both in the course of Francis Beckett's dystopian play, playing at the Etcetera theatre in Camden Town.
But the low-lifes preying on Michael all have their own tragic stories and their predicament isn't their own fault. The widespread impoverishment is the result of the privatisation of public services and the surrender to the free market by the government, which has farmed health and education out to big American corporations. 'You can't cure poverty -- if you stay too close to the poor you can catch what they've got,' warns one character. But revolt is somewhere in the air, and the downtrodden lumpenproletariat are planning a 'London Spring' revolt in Trafalgar Square.
There are echoes here of Moscow in the early 1990s and of last year's Arab Spring, and some sharp satire on prevalent first world attitudes to the third world which make uncomfortable listening for Londoners. The author is a fellow journalist and fellow member of Player-Playwrights who shares my passion for modern history, though it's fair to say our political views don't quite coincide. Francis takes an unashamedly Old Labour view of the world, which I don't share, and I think I find myself struggling to buy into his rather paranoid view of the future. The link between free market economics and impoverishment doesn't make sense; in 1990 Russians were impoverished not so much by the painful medecine of free prices as by the total collapse of the old state-run centralised system. Twenty years on, whatever one thinks of the ghastly Putin regime, privatisation has left most of them substantially better off.
None of this matters in purely theatrical terms; I'm quite happy to swallow anything I see on stage, if I can suspend my disbelief, but the story here never quite breaks the bounds of realism. The action stays rooted in a single location and takes place in real time with no breaks or intervals; this means it flows at a cracking pace but gives the characters little time to develop. Michael thinks he can rescue Catherine, a doctor who now turns tricks on the streets rather than tourniquets, by taking her back to his home across the Atlantic, even though it may ruin his career. But the invitation comes too early in the story, and the 'London Spring' street protests remain a shadowy presence offstage. Nonetheless, Suzy Kendall provides a winning performance as Catherine, successfully suggesting a woman who is genuinely hesitating about how she should respond to Michael. The other standout performance is by Chloe Welsh as Jane the Australian tourist guide. These characters are well imagined, but the play needs to step further away from realism and into a phantasmagoric urban nightmare to deliver an impact that matches the ideas behind it.
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