Mark Ravenhill's first play is as bleakly coarse as its title; its text as emotionally empty as plastic pre-prepared food or a roll of toilet paper. It is also a paradox: the literal superficiality and banality of virtually everything that its characters utter is dramatically offset by the almost physical anger with which its author seems to have framed every situation portrayed in it. It is a roaring polemic in which the audience is forced by the emotional void to treat it intellectually.
It offers an impoverished world in which the only sheetanchor is money. Everything that happens is a transaction. People who pay get what they demand. Those who get paid provide whatever is asked.
Lulu (Caroline Katz) lives with Robbie (Pearce Quigley), who may love Mark (Lloyd Hutchinson), who falls in lust with a young rent-boy called Gary (Russell Barr). Mark has been a heavy user of drugs - "everything I felt was chemically induced. Are there any feelings left?" Lulu and Robbie, he having given away several thousand pounds worth of drugs, are indebted to Brian (Tony Guilfoyle) and take to running a telephone sex chat-line to pay him back.
It does not get any more cheerful than that and visibly, physically, it gets worse. Even within its own terms, an act of generosity does not win redemption.
There can be no redemption in Mr Ravenhill's empty world. The four emotional cripples are left with just an acceptance of plastic food after the emotional crippler has departed. Yet the author's underpinning anger keeps the audience thoughtfully pinned to its collectively seat even while being repulsed by the transactions it is witnessing.
Max Stafford-Clark's direction reveals all and hides almost nothing in a setting by Julian McGowan that reflects in plastic-screened neon lights the tackiness of the author's valueless world.
It is emphatically a play for mature adults (and maybe not even for all of those). But it is also, because of its anger and despair, a highly moral tract. And it is extraordinarily well acted by all of its cast: seldom has vacuous banality, self-loathing and hopelessness been so energetically portrayed on stage.
Runs until October 4th.
