Cheesy skit: A Mirror, at the Almeida Theatre, reviewed

The playwright Sam Holcroft likes to toy with dramatic conventions and to tease her audiences by withholding key information about the characters. This tinkering seems to scare the critics into praising her scripts even though they feel like clumsily written thrillers or botched sci-fi yarns where the rules keep changing. Her technique appeals to high-minded theatres such as the Almeida because it enables A-level drama students to fill their notebooks with impenetrable guff about ‘metatextuality’ and ‘poly-ironic approaches to narrative’.

Holcroft’s new satire, A Mirror, opens with a bogus wedding that gets disrupted when a gang of cops march on stage and cancel the ceremony. A strange start. Then the play proper begins and it turns into a play-within-a-play. Or rather several plays-within-a-play. We meet Celik (Jonny Lee Miller in a pair of sinister black gloves), who works as chief censor for a Stalinist regime that restricts public access to drama. Celik enjoys his role as a cultural commissar and he encourages a promising young dramatist, Narrowman, to mimic the style of an older writer, Bex, whose acclaimed scripts help to reinforce the regime’s hold over the populace.

An hour of stage time is taken up with Celik, Bex and Narrowman performing read-throughs of scripts in the offices of the ministry. But this leaves little time for the characters to step outside their roles as actors and to behave like human beings. And the nonsense about the bogus wedding keeps popping up again and again to give the show a feeling of dynamism and jeopardy. It all seems over-complicated and self-referential. If you remove the pretentious add-ons, the show is just a cheesy skit on the world of amateur dramatics. It could be Noises Off by an author who wants to be Brecht or Pirandello.