Suicide note

The Gods Weep
Hampstead, until 3 April

Mrs Warren’s Profession
Comedy, booking to 19 June

Finding fault with Shakespeare is one of the RSC’s favourite activities. It’s now so fed up with King Lear that it has decided it needs to be scrapped and rewritten. A tall order? Not a bit of it. The company maintains a team of ‘embedded’ writers whose talents rival those of the bard, more or less, and Dennis Kelly has been given the tiresome but necessary job of correcting the faults of this famously ill-written drama. Kelly’s previous works — Debris, Orphans, Osama the Hero, and Our Teacher’s a Troll — give some hint of his artistic range. He likes controversy, violence and macabre humour. (He dedicates the text, in the third person, to ‘Jeanie and Marie for putting up with him even when he’s being a prick’.)

Coyly entitled The Gods Weep, the play opens with a mysterious billionaire named Colm dividing his international business empire between two underqualified subordinates. War breaks out within the company. The conflict spreads to one of the firm’s Caribbean territories and then boomerangs back and engulfs the whole of Britain. Though the plot consists of a few simple gestures, it’s also strangely hard to follow. There are entanglements involving astrology and faithless romances. Colm discovers that he has a daughter and in the final act we watch them camping out during a nuclear winter, eating squirrels, talking balderdash and getting wet.

The dialogue is brutish throughout. Everyone swears. Ugly fights and ketchupy slaughter abound. The director, Maria Aberg, keeps resorting to adolescent shock tactics, to firecrackers, gunshots, flashing lights and those trick knives that leave trails of blood across slashed flesh. As the red sauce flew, a woman just ahead of me slumped forward in her seat and stuck her fingers firmly in her ears.