A surefire international hit: Lungs reviewed

No power on earth can stop Lungs from becoming an international hit. Duncan Macmillan’s slick two-handed comedy reunites Matt Smith and Claire Foy from The Crown. It’s short (90 mins), it has a minimalist set (‘arty’), and it makes no intellectual demands on the crowd (phew!). Best of all, it parrots all the ecological prejudices currently supported by today’s urban bourgeoisie.

Matt and Claire play a broody couple who fear that having a child will destroy the planet and kill billions of their fellow earthlings. Their voluble anxieties persist for 40 minutes and become a little tiresome for those blessed with long memories. Older play-goers, like me, know that every climate scare offered to us in the past 45 years has turned out to be bogus, including the notorious ‘reglaciation’ threat announced in Time magazine, 24 June, 1974: ‘Another Ice Age?’ But Matt and Claire are confident that the Earth is about to be consumed by toxic air, expiring forests and scorching temperatures, and that every inch of occupied land will soon be swamped by rising seas.

However, like most eco-activists, they consider themselves exempt from the sacrifices they want imposed on everyone else. ‘We’re good people,’ they say, meaning that they recycle, they monitor their carbon footprint and they watch subtitled films. They distinguish themselves from ‘thoughtless people’ (‘the lower orders’ as they were once called) who breed without a care for the planet’s future. Matt goes one further and suggests that giving birth should be licensed by the state, like the ownership of a car or a shotgun.

All these issues are articulated in amusing, quickfire dialogue which carries a strong element of self-parody. We’re invited to enjoy Matt’s authoritarian distaste for the poor without feeling that he genuinely believes his own rhetoric.