A World Elsewhere hints it’s about Bill Clinton. But it’s about Al Gore

Why, oh why, the producers ask, are the national press so reluctant to cover the London fringe? The snag is that a national paper has to justify a report about a play produced in a Deptford yoga studio, or in a Wandsworth priest hole, to readers living in Liskeard, Inverness, Great Yarmouth and Carlisle. Rather than changing the habits of the newspapers, the producers might change the way they select plays. A few years ago, a modest little venue in Hoxton mounted a satire called The Death of Margaret Thatcher. The national papers dispatched their finest critics and they were joined by political commentators from around the world. The play was rubbish, alas, but as a piece of publicity it remains unsurpassed.

Theatre 503 in Battersea seeks to emulate this ploy. A World Elsewhere, by Alan Franks, is set in Oxford in 1968. ‘A girl is losing her heart to a brilliant young American with a dark secret,’ says the blurb. It goes on, almost panting with excitement, ‘Alan Franks was a contemporary of Bill Clinton.’ What a corker! Clinton as a playboy undergraduate, seducing the daughters of the nobility, smoking dope without inhaling, worming his way into leftie groups in order to pass secrets about Oxford’s commies to the CIA (at least according to Christopher Hitchens’s memoir).

Alan Franks’s script doesn’t quite deliver on this promise. The brilliant American, Elliott Farmer, is a conspicuously charmless high-flier who has a colossal talent for soundbites made of pure lard. He tells us he plans to ‘travel east’ when he graduates. After that, he says, he will travel west: because a man can die without getting to know his own people. This isn’t Bill Clinton. It’s bloody Al Gore.