Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

How to Hold Your Breath, Royal Court, review: yet more state-funded misanthropy

Plus: a smart, funny new play at The Space, which everyone in TV should see

issue 21 February 2015

‘We hate the system and we want the system to pay us to say we hate the system.’ The oratorio of subsidised theatre rises, in triumphant blast, at the Royal Court whose current empress Vicky Featherstone has chosen to direct an interesting new play by Zinnie Harris. I’d call it a quasi-symbolist extraterrestrial tragicomic chicklit road-movie spoof with Chomsky-esque anti-corporate neo-collectivist socioeconomic textual underpinning but I fear this may lend it a clarity of purpose, and a firmness of character, which it doesn’t quite possess.

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