Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Muswell Hill reviewed: a guide on how to sock it to London trendies

Plus: a much-needed corrective to paedophile hysteria in How I Learned to Drive at the Southwark Playhouse

issue 28 February 2015
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  • Muswell Hill

    Park Theatre, until 14 March

  • How I Learned to Drive

    Southwark Playhouse, until 14 March

Torben Betts is much admired by his near-namesake Quentin Letts for socking it to London trendies. Letts is one of the few individuals who enjoys the twin blessings of a Critics’ Circle membership card and a functioning brain so his views deserve serious attention.

The title of Betts’s 2012 play Muswell Hill shifts its target into the cross hairs with no subtlety whatsoever. Curtain up. Married couple, Jess and Mat, are nervily tidying their yuppie dream home in expectation of supper guests. Jess is a sex-bomb accountant. Mat is a blankly handsome scribbler whose debut novel keeps getting rejected. Then a missile strikes. Mat casually mentions his acquaintanceship with an Australian electrician whom Jess has been secretly entertaining. Tense silence. The doorbell rings. Into this emotional quagmire march two damaged misfits. Karen is a vegan widow (enough said), and Simon is a ranting Trot who wants to burn capitalism to the ground and dance in the embers handing out sweeties to grateful orphans.

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I adhere to a pretty iron-clad rule: not only do I avoid the bumper cars of social media, but I don’t read the comments after my columns. Many other journalists avidly lap up reader responses to their work, and there’s certainly something to be said for confronting detractors, thus learning to anticipate counter-arguments and to

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