Bartlett’s restoration-style satire on wokeness at the Lyric Hammersmith lacks bite but has enough wit to offer an engaging evening out.
1 May 2022
Restoration comedies emerged after the long, dark, theatre-less days of Cromwell’s England. What audiences wanted was a bit of excitement, and a break from the po-faced and priggish brigades of woke killjoys who had spent years spoiling everyone’s fun. Sound familiar?
There are certainly some good digs at what Mail and Telegraph editorials often demonise as puritanical wokeness in Mike Bartlett’s Scandaltown. The hugely busy narrative commences with Phoebe Virtue, finely played by Cecilia Appia as an archetypal prissy and prudish woke-warrior, setting out upon a journey from rural innocence to London plague-pit on a mission to save brother Jack from the sins of cocaine, booze, and political incorrectness.
Phoebe is the type of wokester who calls out a character for using the phrase ‘taking someone’s virginity’. Not to be used apparently, as it represents an ‘offensive and unacceptable claim of ownership’. Not a laugh-out-loud joke maybe, but as one of a multitude of cynical comments on the nature of woke obsessions, it is amusing enough.
On arriving in London, Phoebe disguises herself as a man – as befits a restoration-style work there is much gender and sexual fluidity throughout – and insinuates herself into the disreputable household her polyamorous brother shares with equally morally compromised flatmates, Jenny Hood, and Tom Double-Budget.
But will Phoebe manage to return her brother safely to the innocence of wokedom, or will she too be dragged down into the hideous London swamp of lust, greed, and gender-criticality?
The rest of the plot is rather too complicated to recount, but involves a Netflix masked-ball, several similar Harlequin outfits, long-lost parents, mistaken identities, boudoir machinations, raffish behaviour, and more sexual parings than you might encounter among a troop of bonobo monkeys on a fortnight in Ibiza.
The play’s intricate narrative structure and cynical take on human nature is certainly true to the restoration style. The characters are driven by sexual appetite, avarice, and the desire to take revenge on long-past slights, or simply to get one up on each other. In Bartlett’s extravagant, innuendo-laden dialogue there is much wit to enjoy, even it is of the amusing rather than the belly-laugh kind.
And it is not just the prim excesses of Gen Z woke-warriors that Scandaltown has a cynical go at. In no particular order he has a poke at Boris Johnson and party-gate, Gove’s disco-dancing, the North-South divide, the sexual incontinence of politicians, Instagram influencers, anti-capitalist anarchists, tv luvvies and media types, The Apprentice, the 80s, the 90s, age and gender conflict, helicopter parents, and much more besides. You name it, he mocks it.
If there is a problem with this type of scattergun approach to parody, it is that it often misses its target and rarely does much damage when it lands. I am tempted to say that much of the satire in Scandaltown, although elegantly and cleverly expressed, has as much bite as a defanged sheep. I wonder whether Bartlett has taken the wokester preoccupation not to offend anybody rather more to heart than he thinks he has.
Bartlett’s bash-them-all-nicely approach comes together better in the more satisfying second, with some interesting musings on the nature of personal choice and the idea that it is not always possible to reconcile doing the ‘right thing’ with the need to have a little fun in life.
That fact that we cannot all be perfect, all the time, is perhaps the one thing the older generation genuinely can teach the pious and sometimes too serious young.
Performance-wise, Rachael Stirling’ Lady Susan Climber, a Machiavellian bounder determined to succeed at all costs, stood out. Kinnetia Isidore’s gorgeous costumes also deserve a mention.
Scandaltown has enough in it to make it worth seeing.
Writer Mike Bartlett
Director Rachel O’Riordan
Cast
Phoebe Virtue Cecilia Appiah
Jack Virtue Matthew Broome
Auntie Julie Emma Cunniffe
Peter Media Henry Everett
Matt Eton Richard Goulding
Freddie Peripheral Luke Hornsby
Hannah Tweetwell Aysha Kala
Tom Double-Budget Thomas Josling
Rosalind Double-Budget Annette McLaughlin
Jenny Hood Ami Okumura Jones
Sir Dennis Hedge Chukwuma Omambala
Lady Susan Climber Rachael Stirling.
Full Disclosure: Ticket from Central Tickets.
