Four play | 14 May 2015

If Julian, Dick, George and Anne had become terrorists they’d have called themselves The Angry Brigade. It’s such a Wendy house name. The quartet of violent outcasts met in a Camden squat in the late Sixties and moved to Stoke Newington where they rented a house to deflect unwanted attention. They began planting bombs around London in the hope of jerking the proles from their consumerist trance and sparking a communist war. They preferred catchy locations for their fireworks: the Albert Hall, a BBC film unit, an MP’s garden. And it took the cops ages to track them down and sling them in jail.

James Graham’s new play uses a neat staging device. There are four terrorists and four detectives, and the same actors play both hunters and quarry. But the sprawling script features a handful of cameo roles as well and this mars the purity of the original scheme. The show might have been better researched. In the 1970s no one said ‘bog-standard’, ‘box-ticking’ or ‘go-to’ (as in ‘expert’). The telephones chirrup with the American, not the British sound-pattern. Ditto the police sirens. Neither of the male actors reaches the minimum height (5 ft 8 inches) stipulated by the Met in those days. And these young thesps are far too fresh and pink-cheeked to play senior detectives at Scotland Yard, so the investigation scenes have an atmosphere of parody that doesn’t suit the material.

Although Graham is a skilful weaver of plot lines, he dispenses with this great talent and offers us a series of busy vignettes. It can feel flimsy. The kindergarten Marxists consist of two Cambridge dropouts and a pair of nice girls from suburbia. They’re all clever, comfortably off and expensively educated, which proves that if you give people everything you make them dissatisfied.