Deborah Frances-White’s first play has the verve of her avidly followed podcast, The Guilty Feminist. Its money-sex-privilege plot is knotty. Lines are flung to the audience like raw meat: should we look on an unwelcome act of cunnilingus as simply a bad down-there moment, a bit like having a smear test? Yet at the end of an evening in which most arguments get a drubbing, a truly sympathetic plea emerges: for solidarity without tribalism.
In Emma Butler’s speedy production, Never Have I Ever is cleverly set up as a drama in which four characters might be expected to leap to their identity stations: black, brown, white, bi, straight, wealthy, hard-up. Equally cleverly, the distinctions are both emphasised and entangled. Old friends meet in a restaurant, run by one couple, financially backed by another – who are about to learn they have lost their money. Yet after drinking, table-dancing and dares, a long-ago secret explodes and another, more dynamically dangerous transaction is proposed. This one involves sex.
It is to the credit of a strong cast that even the play’s preposterous elements provoke authentic reactions. Though Susan Wokoma blazes too relentlessly, Alex Roach is subtle and needling and Greg Wise contorts with terrible plausibility (and far more twists than expected) as the chap who respects “women I don’t even have to respect. Just random women.” Amit Shah, finely doleful, shines with his particular reserved insistence.
There are – hurrah – enough jokes here to make a gagfest: what do you call a female-friendly cab app? “Hail Mary.” Yet Frances-White’s dialogue bounces around naturally, lubricated by humour, not held up by it. It is spiky with precision: how damning the word “thorough” is when used to describe a man’s lovemaking – and yet, as another chap observes, no one would want to be considered “haphazard”.
Frankie Bradshaw’s design adds a shimmer of uncertainty: though gleaming and chicly realistic, it can suggest something more fantastic. Restaurant tables have their own cooking counter attached (it’s an uneconomic concept). Every now and then, like the drumroll that accompanies a punchline, a burst of flame flares up at one of them; they could each be miniature hells. A wall of sliding doors at the back of the stage allows for a spectacular appearance by Wokoma on a motorbike: a one-woman riposte to Easy Rider.
Two couples swivel and collapse very differently in Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage. Commenting on his translation, first staged in Britain in 2008, Christopher Hampton has described England as “probably the most philistine country in Europe”. He’s in a good position to make comparisons. Over nearly 60 years he has created dramatic work as a translator as well as a playwright, and eased a different dimension on to the British stage. In the case of Reza, whose huge hit Art hinged on discussions about a white canvas, the difference involves a quizzical lightness in floating large arguments. Carnage is more direct than Art, but it moves towards strenuous disagreement by minute gradations.
The dispute in this case is between the bourgeois parents of two children. One boy has hit the other with a stick. Does the violent act make him a “savage”? Was he provoked? From whom did the children learn their behaviour? Are these four like the (rather brilliantly evoked) pet hamster unleashed by one hostile parent on to the streets, neither wild nor fully civilised, quaking when exposed to fresh air? How near are we all to the Reza’s edge?
The carefully composed veneer of fashionable decorum is beautifully caught in Lily Arnold’s design: tall standard lamp; upright statue that looks at first glance like the palm of a hand forbidding entry but turns out to be a flattened ancient face; white fabric; a coffee table displaying art books (Francis Bacon a favourite). This revolves in tiny degrees throughout the evening while a ring of light on the periphery is slowly lowered, penning in the characters.
The problem in Nicholai La Barrie’s production, which I saw at its final preview, is the action itself. Even if you have guessed that mayhem is on its way, you should be surprised by the distance travelled between start and finish. You won’t be here. Nothing can diminish the great coup de théâtre – the centrepiece of the evening, as breathtaking as any great ripping apart of a fourth wall – which involves someone chucking up and is concluded by the hostess worrying about the state of her Kokoschka. Yet physical exertion and emphasis enter the arena too early with the actors. They won’t let the lethal words do their own work. Freema Agyeman is the worst offender, acting out each line with wagging arms, yet everyone overdoes it, yelling when what is required is gimlet insertion of malicious uncertainty. Comic venom (“puking seems to have perked you up”) is dampened, along with shock. Mind you, Reza must bear some blame: that title gives too much away. I’d have called it Hamster!
Star ratings (out of five)
Never Have I Ever ★★★★
God of Carnage ★★★
