A quirky double bill takes satirical swipes at everyday American culture
American Nights King's Head Theatre, London N1
A manic-looking masked woman in a robot suit; the booming, godlike voice of Richard E Grant; a hapless young man who is forced to march along a chalk line to work each morning. 2+2+2, by Jörg Tittel, is one half of the American Nights double bill at the tiny King's Head Theatre in Islington. It is a satirical depiction of modern life, seen through an Orwell-tinted lens - Nineteen Eighty-Four meets Starbucks, if you like.
The title refers to the breakfast that our hero, Abe (played by the playwright), eats every morning at the café: two eggs, two pancakes, two rashers of bacon. He has to eat this every day, as there is nothing else on the menu.
Every day, he wakes up and, under the command of Big Brother Grant, must take a cold shower, be dressed by his personal robot (Penny Lisle), and walk along the chalk line to his regular café, the Daily Brad. After eating his breakfast, he goes to work on the 303rd floor of a tower block, where he spends all day writing numbers on a board. Then he goes home and watches TV, where there is only one programme, The Favourite Show.
Abe is content with his lot until romance, and subsequently individualism, turn up. He not only falls in love with the energetic waitress (Kimberly Butler) at the café, but he starts demanding other things for breakfast. This does not go down well. "Choice only makes things complicated," the Voice says, and reminds us: "Work makes us free."
In the programme, Tittel and the director, Alex Helfrecht, explain that the play is "our take on living in today's America, but we believe it speaks to a global audience. We hope it inspires those that see it to WAKE UP!"
Perhaps the image of a man walking to work along a chalk line and then spending all day juggling figures at the office is a rather pert metaphor for all those people shuffling over London Bridge every morning, en route to their hutches in the City. And yes, it's a well-known phenomenon that what people like to eat for breakfast is usually exactly the same thing as they had the day before, and the day before that.
Will it make audiences want to wake up, however? Probably not, because although 2+2+2 is enjoyable and has a jaunty soundtrack (and a scatter of Hollywood confidence courtesy of the recorded voice-over from Grant), it is mainly satirising life under a dictatorship. Modern-day America is not a place where everybody watches one channel on TV. That sort of communal activity has long since gone. If the United States is indeed a dystopia, it is one where you have to negotiate your way around more than a thousand TV channels, and hurdle at least eight different assemblages of egg in the morning. Breakfast in America is an extremely complicated menu these days, and choice the opium of the people.
2+2+2 is preceded by 'Dentity Crisis, a brief, absurdist drama by Christopher Durang. It began life as a writing assignment in which Durang had to come up with a scenario that included a brother, a father, a grandfather, banana bread, crisps and a wastebasket. The result is a cracking comedy about a malfunctioning all-American family in which the mad are sane and the sane mad.
There is a hilarious mother (Nancy Baldwin) who prances about in a Grayson Perry-style dress and believes she has invented cheese, and a quite brilliant turn from Chris Giangiordano, who in the space of about ten seconds has to pull off a gangly American teenager, a stern father, a doddery grandfather and a libidinous French count.
The cast keeps the whole show on the road (just) with a steel grip on lines and a dogged faith that cross-dressing psychiatrists, suicide attempts and ridiculous double entendres about bananas will make for a funny 35 minutes. They certainly do.
For further info and booking details visit http://www.kingsheadtheatre.org
Pick of the week . . .
Elling
Trafalgar Studios, London SW1
Adaptation of Ingvar Ambjørnsen's novel stars John Simm, in a tale of individuality versus Ikea set in Oslo.
Saint Joan
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Shavian drama, Marianne Elliott directing, Anne-Marie Duff starring.
Richard II
Courtyard, Stratford-upon-Avon
Now the ramble through his entire canon has finished, it's back to the Shakespearean repertoire proper.
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