Theatre review: The British Idles
theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39)
***
Writer-director Callum Forbes has given his five-piece cast a suitably garish bunch of characters to have fun with, a lairy gaggle of thrill-seekers who pine for dates with overweight women, converse with each using soundbites of lairy serial bravado (that’s just the women) and get into love-triangle scraps in well-realised nightclub scenes.
It’s not unreasonable to say that such a show will be a circle of hell for many audiences, but younger attendees in particular will enjoy much of the ugly but well-performed humour, and sadly might empathise with more serious discussion of zero-hour contracts and benefit sanctions. The timeliness of this production is also a virtue, with the divided and antagonistic backdrop of Brexit Britain well echoed in the iconoclastic and destructively anti-establishment humour of the piece.
Until today, 8:40pm.