A pair of shockers

Michael Attenborough, the spirited maverick who runs the Almeida, has lavished a first-rate production on David Eldridge’s new play.

Michael Attenborough, the spirited maverick who runs the Almeida, has lavished a first-rate production on David Eldridge’s new play. All that’s missing from this slick, visually pleasing show is any thought or utterance worthy of adult scrutiny. The script introduces us to a TV presenter, Lucy, recently dismissed for smoking heroin in her dressing-room. Skint, hooked on drugs and profoundly depressed, she follows a predictable downward spiral into theft, prostitution and homelessness and from there to counselling and the delusional ‘contentment’ of abstinence.

Eldridge is remarkably uncritical of the drug myths peddled by the counselling community. The fact is that narcotics are perfectly compatible with a rich, long and productive life as Thomas de Quincey, Samuel Coleridge, Sigmund Freud, Keith Richards, Stephen Fry — and even the occasional Spectator columnist — have shown. To guarantee longevity the wise consumer sticks to pure ingredients and judicious dosages. But sermonising therapists have monopolised the debate with their insistence that self-denial, rather than managed indulgence, is the only course for addicts in distress.

This ignores the uncomfortable truth that abstinence leads ex-addicts to alight on new forms of vexatious amusement — wife-beating, religious evangelism, caravanning, recreational litigation, or just mouthing off about their spurious achievements since they kicked the habit — all of which have the anti-social effect of harming innocent bystanders rather than the former druggies themselves. Addicts , with their weak wills and powerful egos, are licensed by their counsellors to go forth and inflict their garrulous narcissism on others rather than handling it in-house. This is a public nuisance we should be fighting, not promoting.

And yet this play, and the critical response to it, warmly endorses the slavish and self-pitying Lucy (played at top volume by Lisa Dillon) and applauds her embarrassing propensity to spend hour after hour, scene after scene, shrieking, carping, whingeing and weeping in the presence of her sister, her mother and various overpaid soul-manipulators.