‘We hate the system and we want the system to pay us to say we hate the system.’ The oratorio of subsidised theatre rises, in triumphant blast, at the Royal Court whose current empress Vicky Featherstone has chosen to direct an interesting new play by Zinnie Harris. I’d call it a quasi-symbolist extraterrestrial tragicomic chicklit road-movie spoof with Chomsky-esque anti-corporate neo-collectivist socioeconomic textual underpinning but I fear this may lend it a clarity of purpose, and a firmness of character, which it doesn’t quite possess.
We start with Dana, a chippy frump on the last lap of her sex life, bedding a UN drudge named Jarron who claims to be ‘a demon, a devil, a god’. ‘I thought you would notice my semen is black,’ he helpfully elaborates. Jarron and his inky tadpoles depart for Alexandria pursued by the besotted Dana along with her sister Jasmine, preggers. En route they meet a comedy librarian (from an alternative universe) whose book titles — How to Stop Gagging With Someone’s Putrid Penis In Your Mouth — are hilariously funny (in an alternative universe).
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