Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Power failure | 21 July 2016

Plus: Gilliam Wright offers a slow-burn performances that steals up on you in Alan Ayckbourn’s groundbreaking – if reactionary – How the Other Half Loves at the Duke of York’s

Fracking is a British tradition. Since 1969 more than 200 sites have used hydraulic fracturing ‘without environmental catastrophes’ according to Dick Selley, an emeritus professor of geology, writing in the programme notes to Fracked! by Alistair Beaton. The satire takes the opposite view and regards fracking as a wicked novelty inflicted on rustic innocents by Big Oil, which hopes to steep the country’s aquifers with radioactive water and massacre all its customers at the same time. That’s the business plan, apparently.

We meet a pootling granny (Anne Reid), who reluctantly leads a campaign to stop Deerland Energy from plastering southern England with horrible drilling platforms. Deerland hires a firm of PR monsters to fight Granny’s retinue of high-minded bumblers and the characterisation starts to slither into facile stereotypes. Everyone in the countryside is a cheery dimwit, everyone in London is a public-school back-stabber. Beaton’s dialogue often sounds like the bleatings of a bus-stop numpty. ‘Why is everyone for sale nowadays? Disgusting.’ Oliver Chris stands out in the best role as a Blairite super-smoothie but too many of his excellent colleagues are under-used. Michael Simkins seems half-asleep as a prissy Deerland executive and James Bolam is barely stretched as a potting-shed duffer who gets a few sparse laughs when he takes on a drawling eco-nuisance.

Beaton’s cumbersome stagecraft gives the assistants a busy night as they turn the PR headquarters into Granny’s humble cottage, and back again, about eight times. And Beaton seems oblivious to topical developments. His gets the Deerland top brass to meet the energy secretary in Whitehall but he ignores the revelation, announced the day before press night, that the department has now been dissolved. A hot-topic show needs to respond to events. Failure to update the script leaves the viewer feeling that he’s ahead of the satirist.

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