By Natalie Bennett

The parliamentary press gallery in Westminster is often accused of treating their subject as though it were a football game: points are “scored” off ministers by their shadows, attacks are “lobbed back”, you’re a member of the “team”. In Whipping It Up, which premiered last week at The Bush Theatre, writer Steve Thompson has gone further: this is politics as Machiavellian ping-pong played for laughs.

The scenario is a complicated but just believable one. It is late December, 2008. The Tories are in power, with a majority of just three. The setting is the hyper-realistically staged Whips’ Office, which has reverted to what Maggie (Fiona Glascott), the formidable Labour Chief Whip who used to call this home, calls a “a public school dorm”.

Traditional Tory voters were to be granted an early present – a bill to tax tents unashamedly aimed at the traveller community. It is designed to show them that the softie, “leftie” PM — no prizes for guessing who that is — is really one of them. But the scouts are upset, because they’ll be hit by the tax too, and then, on the morning before the vote, a farmer shoots for no reason a couple of traveller children. Suddenly, it seems, the political mood has changed, and the government is in trouble on a bill it saw as a shoo-in.
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By Robert Bain

If the idea of two hours of terror is making you jittery already, then don’t worry. Firstly, the Union Theatre lets you bring your drinks in, to calm those nerves, and secondly, Terror 2006 really isn’t that terrifying. It’s certainly entertaining though. The creators have captured that gaudy and slightly grotesque feel of old-fashioned fairgrounds and circuses, right down to the jaunty but sinister music, and creepy, unhinged characters.

This annual horror festival is now in its third year. The night consists of three short plays, two of them based on tales by renowned Victorian ghost story writer MR James. But the highlight turns out to be an interlude between the plays, in which two gypsy showmen do a quick double act involving mutilation.

It’s simple, it’s crude, but it’s really funny and it’s really horrible. The reason it works is that, like good street performers, the pair take the time to build up to what they do, so that when it happens, it seems ten times more impressive than it should.
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By Robert Bain

Boys’ Plays brings together two tales of hero worship between gay males, that leave you wondering who really had the better of whom. The two one-act plays, separately titled Boys’ Play and Extra Virgin, being produced for the first time in Europe by Shamelessboyz, combine remarkably well, flowing like two halves of one whole.

Both are not only about hero worship but also denial – Jack Heifner’s Boys’ Play focuses on two teenagers who insist they are “not queers”, while the apparently more mature characters in Howard Walters’ Extra Virgin must face up to painful secrets in their pasts during an intense one-night stand.
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By Jonathan Grant

March Twenty-Three: A man of tired, but generally respectable, appearance sits at his writing bureau. Judging by the accents and the furniture, he is somewhere in New York in the 1980s. But he could be anywhere, at any time. In front of him is his diary, his release from the world that has made him weary; these pages enable him to express his own opinions in the world that has made him powerless and mute in the face of globalisation’s irresistible force.

In the corner of the room is a small television. CBS News’ Dan Rather is espousing terror; the kind that is the heartbeat pumping money-green blood around consumer economies. Together with the radio on his desk, these media form the window out of which this man looks at the world. There is a curtain-covered pane of glass in the backdrop, but this is used only to spy on his neighbours’ unusual habits.

This is a man clearly at odds with the world, and his place in it. But as the days unravel and the diary entries, which provide the narrative to our story, accumulate, our hero’s writing becomes more resigned and his behaviour more fanatical as Notes from Underground takes unsuspecting twists as it plots the decay of our anti-hero, made rotten by the world to which he is subjected.
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At the centre of Sentenced is a crime – the hideous crime of rape. Yet Matt Hartley’s short play is not about the crime itself, but about the reactions of four people – the wife of the criminal Janet (An Marie Cavanagh); his brother Andrew (Felix Scott) his PA Amanda (Sarah Jane Wolverson), and finally and most awfully, his victim, Ben (Matthew Pearson).

It is a powerful, sometimes gut-wrenching, play that fills the second half of “programme c”, one of three playing in rotation in the Union Theatre’s Shortcuts 2006 festival. The acting is strong, the presentation strong, if sometimes director Cressida Brown’s use of the contrast between shouting and long pauses is a little overdone.

Yet so often as after viewing a play built around such themes, I am left wondering why? What did this play actually have to say, as it was putting the audience through the wringer? Rape is a terrible thing that has destructive effects far beyond the victim… well yes – I suspect most of us know that already. There’s dramatic tension in Janet’s quest, but does it justify the horror?
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