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Courting humour

Lloyd Evans

Tuesday, 18th March 2008

Legal Fictions
Savoy

Baby Girl; The Miracle
Cottesloe

The second play, The Miracle by Lin Coghlan, is also set amidst tower-block wretches. Quite what qualifies Coghlan, a nice, middle-aged Dublin lady, to represent the lives of teenage dropouts in England is rather unclear. The storyline is equally obscure, feeble in conception, laborious in execution. A schoolgirl claiming mystical powers offers weird therapies to troubled youngsters. One of her patients is a criminal skinhead who, for reasons that defy probability, is given orders to befriend a dog. Bad luck, Benjamin Smith. This poor actor has to spend the entire evening sloping around the Cottesloe with his hand up a glove puppet. Another slice of the plot involves a veteran of the Iraq war, but Coghlan pursues neither of these stories with any vigour or artistry. Instead she keeps piling on more and more cameo roles as if desperately hoping that by populating the stage with chattering walk-ons she’ll make someone somewhere somehow say something interesting. Some hope. Mind you, the young audience surprised me by applauding Coghlan’s flaccid soap as heartily as they cheered Williams’s hellish pageant.

There’s a touch of the pulpit about New Connections, a whiff of hook-them-early school-gate opportunism. Curiously, it’s the same thinking that’s applied to drugs. Pot today, smack tomorrow. That’s nonsense, of course, because if all drug users were doomed to heroin addiction the market for cannabis would be tiny. In fact, it’s massive. Likewise, only a fraction of these pimply young guinea pigs will end up permanently devoted to the theatre. But it’s worth a try.