The Arsonists, Royal Court; The Giant, Hampstead; The Bicycle, MenKing’s Head
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Strange happenings in theatreland. Three London playhouses have taken it into their heads to mount a sustained attack on the avant garde. Result â” carnage! Careers are in tatters. Reputations have been shredded. Some of these playwrights will never be seen again. In August the Donmar cruelly demonstrated that N.F. Simpson was unworthy of adult attention by staging two of his silliest playlets alongside a slice of tedious cleverness by Michael Frayn. Last month the Royal Court embarrassed Ionesco by putting on his dated sci-fi fantasy, Rhinoceros. Next the Almeida started knocking lumps out of Caryl Churchill with a resuscitation of her 1970s dodo, Cloud Nine. And the Royal Court has taken a second pop, at Max Frisch this time, by presenting his turgid class-war sermon The Arsonists. They’ve even hired Alistair Beaton to give the translation a sheen of professionalism. The play fails in both its central aims. As propaganda it’s hopeless. Rather than persuading us to adopt a prejudice (Frisch believes wealth is a crime), the play assumes that we already hold the prejudice and examines its possible consequences. That’s not argument but solipsism. As drama the show is equally inept. Two pyromaniacs break into a businessman’s house and fill his attic with drums of petrol. When the businessman discovers these arrangements, he tries to shoo the pyromaniacs off while engaging them in a debate about the ethical justifications of property. The script is so saturated with irony that its dramatic muscles have wasted away. So another experimental dramatist has been mugged and left for dead. Perhaps I’m missing something here but shouldn’t these hapless scribblers be left to fade away in peace?
At Hampstead Antony Sher’s new play examines the creation of Michelangelo’s ‘David’.

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