Young Vic’s Bull, review: a new Mike Bartlett play to bore you into catalepsy

A knockout show at the Young Vic. Literally. The stage has been reconfigured as a boxing ring to make Mike Bartlett’s play, Bull, feel like a sporting fixture. This is a common conceit, even a cliché, but here it’s done superbly. The auditorium floor is squash-club yellow and the stage is surrounded by a casual standing area that creates the ragged informal atmosphere of a training arena. Excellent stuff.

The play is a wordy, tricky, shifty, nasty, faithless thing. The characters lie about their backgrounds so it’s hard to know who, or what, to latch on to. More problematically the plot is infertile. Nothing grows or develops. At curtain-fall the position is the same as at curtain-rise. We’re in a workplace. Three gits in suits humiliate and ridicule the office loser, who flips out and barges around the stage a bit before punching the water cooler in the face. The end.