Photo by Daniel Seiffert

Hate Radio by Milo Rau – Battersea Arts Centre, London

Milo Rau’s Hate Radio takes us into the heart of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when Hutus rose up following the assassination of the President, and slaughtered their Tutsi neighbours using whatever they could lay their hands on. Thirty years on it remains one of humanity’s darkest episodes. As a character in the play notes, it is not just that ordinary people – a priest’s son for example – became enthusiastic murderers, but that they went to extraordinary lengths to torture, rape and mutilate their victims. Up to 662,000 people died.

Orchestrating the killing from an office building in the capital, Kigali, was RTLM (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) a pro-Hutu radio station which denounced Tutsis as ‘cockroaches’ and broadcast details of their whereabouts so vigilantes could find and kill them. Rau’s play sets the scene with filmed testimony from four genoicide survivors, whose accounts are jaw-droppingly terrible. Then we are in the studio, during an hour-long show with three hosts and their MC/link man, which plays out in real time. We hear the relentless pushing of hatred, the repetition of racial slurs, the historical propaganda and the lies. It is like verbatim theatre, replaying real life events in all its ordinariness and horror. It is relentless and chilling – and extraordinary. It is impossible to turn away for a moment.

The three presenters are real characters: Kantano Habimamba (Diogène Ntarindwa), Valérie Bemeriki (Olga Mouak) and Georges Ruggiu (Sébastien Foucault), all now either in prison or vanished, presumed dead. Their interplay is hosts is horribly convincing, and their voices (the play is in French and Kinyarwanda, with subtitles) pound into our heads through the headphones we wear, making the show seem both intimate and separate, just as real radio does. Some of the moments that stay in the mind pass without comment such as when Kantano, as he was known, takes off his jacket revealing that he the gun strapped to his business shirt. Or they are heart-stopping, especially when the radio show goes to a song, each track played in full. Nirvana’s ‘Rape Me’, complete with enthusiastic drumming from the presenters, is almost impossible to bear. The way Kantano dances wildly in his suit to Reel 2 Reel’s ‘I Like to Move It’ encapsulates the frenzy of killing. And the show’s sign-off song, Joe Dassin’s ‘Le Dernier Slow’, is staggeringly sinister and intensely sad. Hate Radio is a stunning piece of theatre, showing us utter evil in all its ordinariness, and delivering a timely warning. If it happened then, it can happen again.

After the Act: A Section 28 Musical by Breach Theatre – New Diorama Theatre, London

The New Diorama’s Intervention 01, a season with no shows during the second half of 2022 is over. Its aim was to take stock post-Covid, regain excitement, and focus resources on building ambitious work that would not otherwise get staged. On paper, it was a bold and forward thinking, but the test lies in the quality of the work that comes out of the process. Breach Theatre’s After The Act strongly suggests this was an artistically inspired move. Their musical about Section 28 – legislation passed 35 years ago by Margaret Thatcher’s government banning “the promotion of homosexuality” in schools – is a wild, moving, engaged and essential piece of theatre. It tells audiences to look much harder at their assumptions about the supposedly progressive society they live in, and does so from the throes of a brilliantly unhinged party.

Co-writers Ellice Stevens and Billy Barrett have devised a verbatim / musical / agitprop / physical theatre with strong echoes of Tammy Faye and the film Blue Jean, but with an identity all of its own. Directed by Billy Barrett the four performers, including Ellice Stevens as well as Tike Mu’tamir, EM Williams and Zachary Willis put on a high energy show. Their movement and physical occupation of the stage is beautifully choreographed, as they create the show’s all-action atmosphere by impersonating an entire dance troupe. The music, played live by composer and musical director Frew and by Ellie Showering, is synth-driven, catchy and entirely appropriate to a show about the 1980s, without entering the realms of pastiche.

While the music is highly entertaining, the show’s power comes from the sophistication of its writing, which draws on deep analysis of the circumstances around the Section 28 controversy. It’s safe to say this the first time anyone has put former Manchester City Council leader Graham Stringer’s protest rally address to music, still less the grimly bigoted Parliamentary speeches made by Conservative MPs Elaine Kellett-Bowman and Jill Knight in support of the bill. The clause stated that a local authority should not “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” It is a shocking piece of hate that had serious consequences for some and gave rise to iconic cultural moments. The ‘invasion’ of BBC News studios by protestors is very entertainingly staged, Nicholas Witchell and Sue Lawley still gaining plaudits today for the way they dealt with those awful lesbians. The accounts of the two women who abseiled into the House of Lords debate on the bill are funny and moving. Breach Theatre also cleverly stage scenes from the pages of Danish children’s book ‘Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin’, which became a lightning rod for the fear and hatred that exploded from the bill’s supporters.

The show boldly switches mood several times. Verbatim-style scenes, including accounts of the experiences of a teenager bullied for being gay and a teacher forced to hide her real self, are powerful and make the arguments against Section 28 by themselves. The clause was only repealed in 2003, showing our society had not progressed nearly as far as people imagined by the early 21st century. Importantly, Breach also makes the link with current debates around Trans rights explicit, pointing out that it remains fundamentally wrong to tell someone they must change who they are. Unfortunately, this message remains as urgent today as it did in 1988. The show is full of invention, variety and sophistication. It is a tribute to the New Diorama’s leadership that they have found a way to support and enable work this good. After the Act is Breach’s best work to date, and an exciting leap forward for a company who have always promised much.

Julius D’Silva, Archie Backhouse, Forbes Masson, Alan Cox, Daniel Boyd and David Yelland. Photo: Alex Brenner

Farm Hall by Katherine Moar – Jermyn Street Theatre, London

After the Nazi defeat in 1945, the Allies flew ten of Germany’s leading nuclear scientists to the UK. They were interned at a farmhouse in Godmanchester, near Cambridge, for six months while their conversations were recorded to discover how close the Nazis had come to producing an atom bomb. While in captivity they heard the news of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs which, as holders of Nobel prizes for significant advances in nuclear technology, they had helped to enable. In January 1946 they were all released, and returned to their academic careers in Germany.

This scenario is a ready-made play, a situation where some of the greatest scientific minds of their time are confronted with the consequences of their personal and political actions. The transcripts of the Farm Hall recordings were published in the 1990s, and other plays have been produced using their contents. However, Katherine Moar’s play, which has its first full production at the Jermyn Street Theatre, makes good use of the material to create a compelling drama, in which a large cast is handled well.

Only six of the scientists are represented on stage, a sensible decision which gives each character enough room to develop. Moar boldly holds off discussing the war or nuclear weapons for several scenes, during which the men stage amateur drama, play games, bicker and try not to discuss what really matters. Reality intrudes when a newspaper reports the Soviet capture of parts of East Germany, where Bagge (Archie Backhouse)’s wife lives. The social tensions emerge between characters, and then the political ones. Support for Hitler varies among the group from disengagement (Heisenberg) to clear support (Diebner) and regret that the bomb was not built in time for Germany to use it.

The performers are an excellent group of actors, who play convincingly off one another. Julius D’Silva’s Diebner is awkward and unsociable, but likeable too, a portrait of man who convinced himself that the Nazis were essential to his career. So, in a way, did Heisenberg who Alan Cox plays with an ability to separate himself from the everyday that is both disarming and sinister. He charms his way around his leadership of Hitler’s nuclear weapons programme, leaving enough doubt about whether or not he deliberately worked to stop the bomb being made. Backhouse’s working class Bagge, a wired young man, has most to lose while his friend Weizsäcker (Daniel Boyd) is privileged and connected. Forbes Masson is the most likeable of the group as Hahne, the man who discovered nuclear fission and feels the weight of what he imagines could be 300,000 deaths at Hiroshima. David Yelland’s older Von Laue is difficult and prickly, and the most anti-Nazi of the lot.

Director Stephen Unwin manages the show effectively. He somehow makes the Jermyn Street Theatre’s tiny stage seem like a spacious living room, with plenty of room for all. Designer Ceci Calf’s dilapidated interior with semi-stripped William Morris wallpaper is very atmospheric, and neatly represents the end of a pre-war world. The heart of the play is a prolonged pause, as the cast waits for the 9pm radio bulletin with news of Hiroshima. They listen to Home Service light classical music as the minutes tick down, knowing that nothing will be the same once the clock strikes. There are no clear moral lessons from Moar’s play – the scientists did what they did through fear, expediency, selfishness and a desire to pretend everything was ok, much as people have always acted and always will. Only this time, the consequences were far greater than anything humans had encountered before.

Medea by Euripides – Soho Place Theatre, London

Soho Place remains a strange theatre – an in-the-round jewel box concealed inside a weirdly bling office block in the new Elizabeth Line era Tottenham Court Road. Vast LED screens, gold-effect facades, low ceilings and high bar prices create an eerie setting, a non-place that belongs no more to London than to any other global city. All the more fortunate, then, that the theatre itself is the best small space in the West End, albeit with few competitors. As the setting for Dominic Cooke’s production of Medea, it could not be bettered. Viki Mortimer’s design consists of a tiled Mediterranean oval and a set of stairs that lead down to an unseen place below. Within the oval, the action takes place. Around it, consequences gather. Below, the worst deeds of all occur. Ben Daniels, playing all the male roles including Jason, Creon, Aegeus and the tutor to Medea’s sons, circles around the oval, approaching in slow motion as Medea speaks, while she is always trapped at the centre of the stage. Cooke also takes the ingenious decision to place the three actors playing the Women of Corinth, who form the Chorus, in the audience. Penny Layden, Jo McInnes and Amy Trigg interject from their seats, stand up and shout advice and eventually come up on stage, where they are reluctantly drawn into the unfolding horror.

As Medea, Sophie Okonedo is entirely herself, but also a woman whose revenge is to become what other people want her to be. The logic she applies to the decision to kill Jason’s offstage lover Glauce and then her two sons makes sense not just to her, but to us as well. She has been stripped of all power – used by Jason to climb the ladder, discarded for another woman and thrown out of Corinth with nothing. She could seek the protection of another man, Aegeus, but if everyone including her husband thinks she’s a witch and an evil influence, proving them right is the obvious course of action. Okonedo is mesmerising, fully inhabiting a role that develops agonising step by agonising step, as Medea strips away all her options until only one remains. Marion Bailey, in the Chorus-like role of the Nurse, expresses the horror at Medea’s actions which she herself is unable to feel.

Ben Daniels’ performance is just as good as that of his co-star, if entirely different. He switches roles with impressive ease, even drawing laughs for his camp Aegeus, while delivering a convincing brutal Creon and a Jason so self-centred he genuinely cannot understand what the problem is. Medea is simply there to do as he says, and trust him even as he destroys her. The test is by Robinson Jeffers, a classic translation first used by Judith Anderson and John Gielgud in 1947 which remains clear, direct and entirely modern. Cooke’s production is superb. The cauldron of ancient hatred he has set swirling behind the theatre’s glass walls brings some essential wildness to an urban landscape of surfaces. It is important that Soho Place continues to programme theatre that would not otherwise be seen outside the subsidised sector – such as Medea and As You Like It – which gives the West End some much-needed depth.

Macbeth by William Shakespeare – Southwark Playhouse (Borough)

Published at Plays International

It is an unusual Macbeth that comes to life with the Porter’s scene, the play’s disconcerting post-murder comic interlude – even more so when it is performed without words. Dale Wylde’s mimed scene is a weird and captivating interlude. It encapsulates the strengths and weaknesses of Flabbergast Theatre’s version, which is a powerful physical spectacle, but frequently seems encumbered by the play’s text, which gets in the way of the performers’ urge to express themselves. The company is on stage throughout, dressed in braces and sackcloth kilts and daubed with mud. As the audience arrives, they are already moving as a group, twisting and grasping at things in the air around them. This haunted atmosphere defines the show. The performers generate a powerful physical presence, driven by their commitment to a form of theatrical expression rarely seen from a British company.

Flabbergast Theatre was set up by Henry Maynard, who directs and designs Macbeth, and plays the title role. At the first opportunity after lockdown, in 2020, the new collective lit out for the Grotowski Institute in Poland to work with performer Matej Matejka, who then joined them as movement director on Macbeth. The togetherness and collective purpose that came from this process is obvious. It is exciting to see such a bold, expressive, and startling interpretation, entirely unlike the standard English Shakespearian production. It is visceral, animalistic and strange. However, the approach has some significant downsides, and the main victims are the text and the nuances of the play.

The performers tend to play their parts with exaggerated vocal mannerisms, accompanied by bold physical expression. This creates types rather than individuals with, for example, Daniel Chrisostomou’s Duncan a Pere Ubu-style grotesque. Yet Macbeth does not lend itself to this approach. Despite its all-action surface, the play is full of intuition, off-stage disasters, unspoken thoughts and social awkwardness. These subtleties are absent from Flabbergast’s version, and it is often difficult to hear what is being said. Emotions are signalled in to reinforce what the text says, including Briony O’Callaghan’s Lady Macbeth dragging her husband by the hair to help screw his courage to the sticking post, and Maynard having an epileptic seizure when confronted with the Witches’ prophecy. The company’s approach delivers impressive energy but not clarity and, without prior knowledge of the play, it is difficult to follow what is happening on stage.

Adam Clifford’s music is a key driver of the play’s atmosphere. Four drums at the rear of the stage, beaten simultaneously, create propulsive ritual rhythms. The cast prowl the stage brandishing staves, which they pound on the stage, especially effective during battle scenes, and hand chimes which sound eerie notes. The ritual element is strong, and much of the play feels like a whirlpool of fate, from which none of the characters will emerge. Interestingly, this includes Malcolm whose crowning by the witches at the play’s end is an ominous moment, a reminder that we already know his children will not succeed to the throne. 

Flabbergast’s strengths are movement and spectacle, and there are memorable scenes throughout. The Macbeths lie on a vertical bed, held up by witches and spirits whose gurning faces frame the couple. The cast moves as a single snorting, menacing cluster to send Banquo on his fatal horse ride, and lurches across the stage in unison, staves akimbo, like a cohort of samurai, as the armies advance on one another. However, the decision to include the tricky scene in which Malcolm tests Macduff by declaring himself unfit to be king, shows us what is missing. Sometimes cut from the play, it is tough to make the dialogue credible, but Maynard and Daniel Chrisostomou play it straight and, counter-intuitively, it is a moment of clarity and relief. Suddenly, the audience is absorbed in the dialogue but, when another character enters, the performance style reverts and the atmosphere dissipates.

It is tempting to think that Maynard could have achieved what he wanted by ditched much more of the script. Flabbergast’s style is exciting and, in many ways, what our text-constrained theatre needs. The company’s ambition is admirable, but Macbeth, at least in this form, is not an ideal vehicle for their skills. Perhaps it is a staging-post, en route to the fully free physical expression that these performers are clearly well-equipped to deliver.

Jenna Coleman and Aidan Turner. Photo: Johan Persson

Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons by Sam Steiner – Harold Pinter Theatre, London

Sam Steiner’s play has followed a well-documented path from student drama to West End, thanks partly to the simplicity of its central concept (a society much like ours restricts everyone to a maximum of 140 words, written or spoken, per day), but also its structure as a two-hander with a pair of attractive parts for an attractive male and an attractive female lead. From the balcony of the Harold Pinter Theatre, it seems like a play better suited to the Paines Plough mobile Roundabout auditorium where it became known. The play’s strongest suites are charm and intimacy, but it’s hard for even the most skilled performers to hit the back of the stalls with their loveability. Aidan Turner (who seems to have grown a beard during the run) and Jenna Coleman give it a good try though, and their interaction is convincing and enjoyable.

Set on a Roundabout-sized carpet circle walled in with domestic detritus, the action focuses on the two actors, who meet, get together and cycle through the phases of a normal relationship while politic turns dark in the background. Too much of the play, around two thirds, is spent on the build-up which, although nicely written, does not tell us enough that is new about the way men and women relate to one another. The political concept, distopian and fascinating, has great potential that is not entirely fulfilled. Steiner seems unsure whether the word limit is to be taken entirely literally, or whether it is primarily a metaphor. If the former, the writing needs to be more precise, with word limits actually enforced in each conversation rather than only sometimes. The absurdities of a situation where a couple cannot communicate because they have used up all their language elsewhere has potential that seems underexplored. As a metaphor, the idea is powerful and it is hard to believe that Lemons… predates the pandemic. The sense of claustrophobia, and the need to make the best of an inconceivable loss of freedom feels darkly familiar. The play also contrasts unjustified male certainty with restricted female expression in a way that feels agenda-setting for 2015, when it was written.

In the end, Lemons… falls between stools, providing neither a dystopian alternative near future nor a full exploration of character. Neither of the two characters, Oliver and Bernadette, feels entirely real. Nevertheless, it is a play that asks questions and at its best makes the audience shiver in recognition as well as laugh in sympathy.

Tim Crouch – photo by Stuart Armitt

Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel by Tim Crouch – Battersea Arts Centre, London

For Tim Crouch, challenge is inherent to performance. Walking onto a stage to address an audience immediately raises questions about who we imagine we are, both audience and actor. ‘Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel’ is as stripped back as performance can be with no set and only Crouch, wearing a suit and a virtual reality headset, talking to us on a bare stage. He warns us that this is all we will get, and that there is nothing inside the headset either. Then, having set the bar for audience engagement very high indeed, he tangles us in a net of his own devising, leaving us amused, baffled, embarrassed and horrified during an intellectually fascinating, theatrically irresistible hour and ten minutes.

The show could be entitled ‘I, Fool’, and it clearly relates to Crouch’s series of monologues imagining Shakespeare from the perspective of marginalised characters: ‘I, Banquo’, ‘I, Cinna’, ‘I, Malvolio’ and ‘I, Peaseblossom’. For some of the time he is The Fool from ‘King Lear’, and the show plays around the character’s disappearance in Act III of the play, his fate unexplained, never to return. Crouch, with his headset on, describes a theatre to us. ‘King Lear’ is playing on stage but he, The Fool, cannot take the horrors happening around him anymore. He walks out, or tries to, away from the aristocrats torturing and destroying one another. But he also turns us gaze on the audience in a West End-style venue, from bored corporate Deloitte executives to those on pre-theatre dinner deals, in the £95 seats, or who have snuck down from standing. He describes the nature of a theatre dominated by money, where the motivations of those attending are shaped by spending power and privilege. 

The chaos on stage is just a spectacle to the West End audience, a story with no direct relevance. But Crouch also tells us about ourselves, the Battersea Arts Centre audience, in virtual reality, suggesting we are a Guardian-reading, self-satisfied tribe. He questions whether there is any point in performance or theatre.  All “this” is dying, he says, everyone watches television now. Only people like us are interested, and we do not matter. It is a stark assessment of the arts in Britain, and contains more truth than performers generally like to acknowledge. Yet he also simultaneously counters his argument with his powerful, seemingly effortless presentation of a blank slate, where a stage can be used to do and say anything.

Crouch, however, is not just interested in the small world of the stage, but in culture much more widely. The show contains a scene of jaw-dropping depravity, in which the repeated use of the phrase “you know” does nothing whatsoever to disguise the scenes of gruesome, ‘Naked Lunch’-style sex acts he describes, in detail. It is a disconcerting sequence as Crouch, whose charm makes the audience complicit with him from the start, becomes a suddenly menacing figure asking us whether we are entertained and why we think we should trust him. It is a brutal parody of reality culture, strongly suggesting that we are culturally in a dark place. 

The show’s title is a quotation from The Fool and reads, in full, “Truth’s a dog must to kennel / He must be whipped out”. The Fool is a character who says ‘no’ and stands up to the horror. He shows us that truth is something that society claims to value but rarely wishes to acknowledge. The truths about us are unpalatable. We are deluding ourselves when we think that we do not exploit others, that theatre is a medium of equality, or that we can really see what is going on. But at least we are willing to listen while Crouch shows us ourselves, in a virtual reality mirror. At its best his work is extraordinary, taking big questions and turning them into theatre that possesses a remarkable clarity. ‘Truth’s a Dog to Kennel’ is Tim Crouch on top form.            

Emmet Byrne, Killian Coyle and Dan Skinner in The Walworth Farce. Photo by Tristram Kenner.

The Walworth Farce by Enda Walsh – Southwark Playhouse, London

It is more than 15 years since Enda Walsh’s play The Walworth Farce arrived in London and, like many big hits, the scale of its popularity then has been matched by the speed with which it has been forgotten. It is well due a revival, and the Southwark Playhouse’s revival, directed by Nicky Allpress is exciting. It is also the second play at the theatre’s freshly opened venue in the base of an Elephant and Castle tower block, the start of a much-delayed new era for the Playhouse. If the space provides capacity to examine the case for potential modern classics, it would be of great benefit to the London theatre scene.

The Walworth Farce is set in flat on the eponymous road, which begins outside the theatre’s front door. An Irish father, Dinny (Dan Skinner) and his two sons Blake (Killian Coyle) and Sean (Emmet Byrne) live together in circumstances which it soon becomes apparent are very weird indeed. Only Blake is allowed out, on strictly controlled supermarket trips, while Dinny forces the pair to join him in acting out an endless, absurdly involved ‘play’ which tells the story of their childhoods and their relationship to their revered mother, who is apparently at home in Cork. The play includes many characters, and requires constant role swapping and costume changes, but only Diddy ever wins the ‘acting cup’. They all play multiple characters at the same time, staging conversations with a different wig on each hand. It is ludicrous, funny, then sinister and, when supermarket cashier Hayley (Rachelle Diedericks) arrives to disrupt the routine, threatening to expose the absurdity of their behaviour.

The cast are excellent, and very hard working. The mechanics of the play, which are absurdly complex, are beautifully managed by the performers who have to constantly work together. Dan Skinner combines strutting menace with ludicrous self-delusion, and is exceptionally watchable. Byrne and Coyle are very convincing as brothers who are both connected and separated by their situation. On a neat, squalid set by Anisha Fields characters enter and exit via two large wardrobes during the play within the play, but when the actual front door opens the tone changes. Diedericks is enjoyable and funny as someone who has stumbled into a scenario way beyond her control.

The Walworth Farce is a very interesting play revisited from the perspective of the 2020s. The 2000s obsession with characters trapped in deeply unhealthy fantasy worlds, found in works by Jez Butterworth and Philip Ridley among others as well as Walsh, now seems a defining characteristic of the time. It seems to reflect the scale of change as the digital era arrived, not entirely acknowledged while it was happening. On the surface everything appeared to be the same, but underneath a collective mental breakdown was building. The characters in the Walworth Farce are paddling desperately to maintain their version of reality in the face of fear that, in the outside world, they may as well not exist. Walsh takes the tropes of the Irish play – storytelling, close families, obsession with appearances – and spins them into a wild parody which smashes the stereotypes for good, hacks apart the traditional dramatic structure and paves the way for the new forms of performance that were to come. It is not to be missed.

Photo by Johan Persson

Phaedra by Simon Stone from Euripides, Seneca and Racine – National Theatre (Lyttleton), London

Simon Stone’s rewriting of Phaedra is the latest of many reworkings. Each finds something that speaks to their time in the myth of Cretan princess who falls in love with her stepson and, when he rejects her, causes his death and her own. Stone, who has written and directed the National Theatre’s new version, makes an utterly convincing case that this is a play about things that concern us now. His production has all the confidence and clarity that comes from working with the Toneelgroep in Amsterdam, and is a thrilling experience.

The action takes place inside a glass box designed by Chloe Lamford, which at first seems to distance the audience from the action. However, it soon becomes apparent that this visual metaphor is the key to Stone’s interpretation. He shows us our society through the floor-to-ceiling windows that look down on our cities from new apartment blocks, as well as through our phones, putting everything is on display. His Phaedra is Helen (Janet McTeer), a shadow cabinet minister in an unspecified party, married to Hugo, an ambassador, with an older married daughter Isolde (Mackenzie Davis – making a remarkable stage debut) and a teenage son Declan (Archie Barnes). Their life is busy, high powered and wealthy. The opening scene shows us their family life, inside the box, as they gather for what we discover will be a meeting that upends all their lives. The energy and quality of Stone’s writing shines from the opening moments, as the family greet, tease, annoy and swirl around one another. Actors speak over one another in a way almost never seen on stage – perhaps only in work by Annie Baker – and we are completely convinced that what we are watching is absolutely real. Phaedra starts at top pace and never relents, whisking us through the arrival of the son of Helen’s former Moroccan lover, Sofiane (Assaad Bouab). He has come to see the woman who broke up his family decades before. In response, Helen’s family tear themselves apart.

The evening is a succession of memorable scenes, powered by Stone’s direct, note perfect script and by a full house of fine performances. McTeer is every inch the queen bee politician, whose career always has to come before her family, who either serve her or struggle to escape. It is subtle, clever commentary on the psychological toll politics demands from women. Chahidi gives the performance of a lifetime as the cosmopolitan, loyal and funny companion squeezed out by the history within his family, and his messed up post-colonial identity. Bouab is sincere and devastating as Sofiane, who breaks apart the society his fins simply by his presence, letting the guilt flood out. Davis is very subtle as the daughter who can never please her mother, but can certainly hurt her. John MacMillan, as her husband Eric, is funny and touching as everything goes utterly wrong for him. Barnes is also great, as a teenager old enough to be cocky, young enough to be totally vulnerable.

The glass box situates the audience as voyeurs, gazing on as the increasingly brutal events play out. The more shocking the events become, the more public they are. An astonishing scene erupts at Helen’s birthday meal in a restaurant, next to tables of shell-shocked diners, as both Helen and Isolde reveal they are leaving their husbands for Sofiane, in front of both husbands, Sofiane himself, Declan and a friend (Omolara, played by an acerbic Akiya Henry). But what seems personal is every bit political, as the colonial power relations between France and Morocco, Britain, Nigeria and Iran all become directly relevant to how people relate to one another now. The play, unusually for a British production, is multi-lingual with sub-titled French, Arabic and Farsi spoken at various points. As well as being a thrilling evening of theatre, it is also a highly intelligent dissection of the nation we have become, arrogant enough to imagine we can separate ourselves from the rest of the world and engage with it only on our terms. It is also a very un-English production in the best way, and we should hope that the European influences of creators like Simon Stone continue to feed back onto our own stages, making them less insular and far more connected.