Utopia

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at", said Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man Under Socialism; similarly, a play that includes nothing but a set of random, abstract ideas of Utopia is usually well worth avoiding.

So it proves, alas, with this sorry mélange of feeble revue sketches and toe-curling musical items devised by Steve Marmion and Live Theatre’s Max Roberts, with a handful of writers including Simon Stephens, Dylan Moran, Chi Onwurrah MP, Janice Okoh, Michael Chaplin and Alistair McDowall.

Six actors in clown make-up and white costumes simper and spout clichés and gobbets of received wisdom by Aldous Huxley, Samuel Beckett (“Dance first, think later”) and, er, Adolf Hitler, for what seems like an eternity of torture devised for addicts of children’s television or Godspell, or possibly both.

“
The show has the intellectual gravitas of a collection of Christmas cracker mottos”

But honestly, the show has the intellectual gravitas of a collection of Christmas cracker mottos and the theatrical excitement of a nursery school exercise for the under-fives. The actors soon discover there’s not all that much to say about Utopia anyway, and the sketches veer off into unfunny game shows, dire domestic face-offs, a pointless incantation of 1852 office laws and a desperate chorus of “I’d like to teach the world to sing” (and drink Coca-Cola).

Tobi Bakare, Rufus Hound and Sophia Myles make up the numbers (or recite them, at least) with David Whitaker bravely plying the keyboards and even more bravely shedding jokes such as, “I like to take my tea with two lumps – my wife and my mother-in-law”. The peeling grey science lab of a set, where the cast are allegedly sorting through all the hopes and plans we have for Utopia, is by Lucy Osborne. My hopes and plans include finding the first bus home.

- by Michael Coveney