Snowflakes, an excellent title, rehashes The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter. A guest in a hotel room is visited by two intruders posing as staff. The intruders are hired assassins who accuse the guest of committing a half-explained hate crime on social media. His punishment, execution, will be livestreamed as a warning to other hate criminals.
Brian Friel’s shrieking bumpkins are exactly what the Arts Council wants us to see
It’s a thrilling start but the show lacks tension and the accused’s back story isn’t explained fully. And once the sentence has been carried out, the story becomes predictable. The core idea – freelance killers dispensing justice on behalf of tech giants – would make a great TV series. It needs a lot of development.
Village Idiot, another great title, is a state-of-the-nation play set in a village that stands on the route of HS2. The bulldozers can’t flatten the last remaining property because a stubborn granny refuses to take the developer’s shilling and sell up. An official, Peter, arrives to evict Granny but he turns out to be her grandson. This looks like an intriguing drama that pitches corporate greed against the ties of a close-knit family, but the writer, Samson Hawkins, discards his best asset and explores tribalism and prejudice instead. He drops Granny and focuses on a tepid affair between Peter and a gay black man who may or may not have gypsy heritage too. A second romance flourishes between two youngsters who appear to be neurodivergent.
Hawkins is a talented and witty dramatist but he chooses to follow the present craze for ‘oppressed’, ‘marginalised’ and ‘silenced’ figures. And, this being a subsidised show, it has to offer us moral lessons about good and evil, and the characters are divided accordingly.
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