Ella Hickson’s last play at the Almeida was a sketch show about oil. Her new effort uses the same episodic format ornamented with ‘meta-textual experimentation’ (i.e. plotless confusion).
The central character is a brilliant young female writer who finds that all male theatre directors are boorish cynical greedy philistine racist sex pests. In Sketch One she meets a smarmy monster twice her age who tries to seduce her with the offer of a script commission. Sketch Two is a commentary on Sketch One, which turns out to have been a play within a play. Sketch Three shows the writer cohabiting with a loser who ‘sells football boots’. The loser has just bought a new sofa (with her money) and he baptises it with an enforced bout of loveless copulation. She tells him that she’s rejected a big movie contract and he attacks her laptop with orange ratatouille, squashing boiled tomatoes into the keyboard. They patch up this quarrel, and the loser proposes marriage with a ring that falls from the sky. A newborn baby is carried on and the scene ends in disorder, poised between reality and pretence. In Sketch Four the writer imagines lesbian sex in a mythical forest. In Sketch Five she argues about commercialism with a male director who, once again, is a boorish cynical greedy philistine racist sex pest. In Sketch Six the writer and her new girlfriend have fun with a purple dildo and discuss biscuits and Picasso.
That’s the clearest account I can give of this two-hour polemic which wants to bask in #MeToo topicality but which feels dated and remote. Are female scribblers still being creeped out by rapist theatre directors? And a writer who feels wary of predatory males could always try a gay director.
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