Sweet Panic

Synopsis

In this dark thriller, a child psychologist's understanding of contemporary life is brought into question when she finds herself stalked by the mother of one of her young clients. In a changing urban world, two women are pitted against each other in a battle for the soul of the city.

Our Review:

13 November 2003

First seen at Hampstead Theatre in 1996, Stephen Poliakoff's Sweet Panic now limps belatedly back into town some seven years later, its story of modern alienation and dislocation reflected in a production that itself seems out-of-place and out of its depth in a far bigger West End theatre.

What might have been a play equal parts edgy contemporary psychological drama and sharp social documentary in the intimate confines of Hampstead now struggles to find an urgency and larger resonance on a wider stage. Poliakoff has written a dense, intense canvas of modern life, as refracted through the concerns of parents for their children of the very different and ever-changing world they have to face from the one that they nostalgically remember.

But instead of the big picture Poliakoff is trying to paint about a "world spinning away from us", as the play's principal nostalgist has it, you paradoxically worry instead about the more intimate and downright distur...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (80.177.104.66) - 30 January 2004:

Utter rubbish. Was expecting something deep and disturbing, it being Poliakoff. What we got was a half-baked mess, with the actors plainly aware of the fact. ...

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