Dumb Show

In Joe Penhall‘s first play since Blue/Orange in 2000 that took the
triple set of Evening Standard, Olivier and Critics’ Circle Best Play
Awards, the playwright has returned to provide another intricately
constructed drama in which three characters face off against each other in a
central moral crisis. But whereas Blue/Orange unfolded in a hermetic
but fascinatingly revealed world of psychiatry, Dumb Show is plucked
from a world we are complicit with every time we absorb (let alone perhaps
relish) the tabloid revelations of celebrity lives, preferably in freefall,
from Michael Barrymore to John Leslie and others.

Here we discover Barry, the television star of a show that he himself says
is “made by idiots, for idiots, because of idiots”, being courted by two
financial advisers from a bank seeking his custom and appealing to his greed
and vanity to do so. There’s even talk of a very substantial fee – “a
substantial financial” as they say in the trade.

But they’re not whom they first appear to be. I’d rather not give away the
key revelation about exactly who they are, though Penhall doesn’t keep you
waiting too long to discover it for yourself – it’s in the third scene. From
this moment, Barry’s already unravelling life starts to unravel further, and
Penhall takes us on a gripping, stinging journey into the price of fame and
those that make their money off the back of it.

In Terry Johnson‘s smart, slick production, played out in a fashionable
five-star hotel room immaculately if clinically designed by Es Devlin,
there’s a burning tension and intensity to the highly charged encounters
that Barry has with his aggressive adversaries.

As with David Mamet‘s Oleanna (also originally premiered in the UK
at the Royal Court), it’s a play that constantly has you re-setting your own
moral compass on the shifting grounds of the revelations that are exposed.
And it’s played to highly-tuned perfection by a cast that features a
heartbreakingly good Douglas Hodge as Barry, fighting for his life and
reputation when it looks like both are going down the plughole, and a
slickly suave Rupert Graves and Anna Maxwell Martin as the couple who
are on his case and won’t let go, as if their own lives depended on it.

– Mark Shenton