Midnight Your Time

Arriving in town from the High Tide Festival, Diana Quick brings a touch of class and elegance to the fringe in this well-written little solo show played on a tiny revolving stage with back projections.

Quick plays Judy, a middle-class Islington lawyer and do-gooder on committees, who speaks once a week on web cam to her activist daughter, Helen, in Palestine.

Helen never replies, not because she’s gone missing, but because she resents Judy’s suggestion that she’d be better off trying to make a difference at home instead of in the war zone.

It’s a skewering of the liberal conscience that would warm the cockles of David Hare’s heart, and there’s something of Hare’s wit and sharpness in Adam Brace’s script, which Quick despatches with style and shrewd reasonableness.

She looks great, too, swivelling and squirming on her office chair in the illumination of her computer screen like a large cat who’s got the cream of her own self-satisfaction.

The extent of Judy’s concern for political realities is shown by inviting an Afghan refugee in Dalston to dinner, though she’s somewhat put out by the social gazumping of her gesture by her friend Bridget and her Eritrean poet partner.

And just when things are back track with Helen, whom we never see or hear, she goes and does something stupid to condemn her to small hours anxiety all over again. A little gem of a show, this, and beautifully done.