Losing the plot

The Sanctuary Lamp
Arcola, until 3 April

Eigengrau
Bush, until 10 April

The Bush produces eight new plays a year in its petite, and rather stuffy, studio space. (Someone fainted last time I was there.) Eigengrau by Penelope Skinner opens as a creaky flatshare comedy with a little light political layering. Mark is a nasty, handsome yuppie who works in marketing, sleeps with slappers and likes to bully his fat, unemployed flatmate Tim. After chucking his latest conquest, the scatterbrained Rose, Mark comes down to breakfast and meets her pal, Cas, a stroppy feminist who despises him on sight. Mark spots a challenge here and, by claiming to be ‘angry with the patriarchy’, he feigns a rush of egalitarian zeal and sweeps her into bed. The pairing of the swindling Romeo with the idealistic Suffragette seems a little glib but the script is rich in gags and the characters acquire depth as the story accelerates.

The first affair is mirrored with a sub-plot involving dippy Rose and dumpy Tim. Ms Skinner has fun mocking Rose’s pretensions to political credibility. Her mum, she claims, supported women’s lib. ‘She was into that whole Germaine Greer Simone de Belle-jour thing. Burning her bra. Sleeping around.’ Polly Findlay’s crisp direction is illuminated by a golden performance from Sinead Matthews as Rose. Matthews has comedy in her chromosomes. The soft scratchiness of her voice, with its curdled-cream texture, seems to teeter permanently on the verge of a full-on Barbara Windsor giggle-quake. And she has a great instinct for steering an audience towards the laughs while giving no sign that her hand is on the tiller. As the show proceeds it acquires sophistication and develops into a challenging commentary on feminism’s pitfalls. Skinner suggests that the movement may have hobbled itself by making the harems of activism available to any man who can disguise his thesaurus of seduction as a revolutionary manifesto. Feminism has been a triumph, she hints, chiefly for its arch-enemy, the predatory male. Equally daring is her idea that radical freedom-fighters like Cas nurture fantasies of masochism and humiliation.

A funny show about phallocentricity is quite a breakthrough and Skinner has stumbled on an additional bonus by creating the sort of script the critics love. It’s fun to watch and, more importantly, it gives us lots to write about. She might do herself another favour by ditching the postmodern irony when choosing her titles and trying self-interested commercialism instead. Eigengrau (trans: ‘the colour seen by the closed eye’) is a great name for an indie band or a moon probe or a celebrity’s love child or a statue made of profiteroles and chicken wire. For a comedy it’s not ideal. But, whatever she calls her next play, I will flock to see it in my droves.