Lower the volume, please

‘How I hate!’ is the first line of Torben Betts’s new play. Not a promising start. A teenage Goth with a scowl like a squashed spider crouches in her bedroom ranting against her smugger-than-smug parents. A revolution erupts. The Goth cheers and is then raped by a mad soldier. The civil war ends and order is restored, and in the closing tableau the stupefyingly complacent parents spout bourgeois platitudes while their pregnant daughter is assaulted afresh, with their connivance, by her rapist. Clearly this is a Big Idea production which seeks to mount a blistering attack on Western values. That’s why it feels so dated.

And yet there are good things here. Had this been a first-time effort I’d have been struck by its energy, its attempts at poetic lyricism, and its occasional surreal joke. But Betts is a seasoned voice with half a dozen plays to his name and he needs to lower the volume a bit, to find a more sophisticated storyline and to tell it in a way that engages the audience’s sympathies. The set is powerfully stylised with the characters trapped in an antiseptic Wendy House and dressed in satirical costumes that stick two fingers up to their materialistic inertia. An effective design but it drags the show away from us and into the cold middle-distance. Rather than being entertained I felt like a rabbit in a laboratory having my eyes squirted with rhetorical solvent. Until Betts writes a human drama, rather than an inhuman one, his work will be consigned to fringe venues, pub theatres, hole-in-the-wall arts centres or indeed to Scotland, where this production is now going on tour. Bring earplugs.