Animals (Theatre503)

Britain has an old age problem in Emma Adams's satire. It’s 2046 and the nation has so many senior citizens that it's opted to abandon them. There are no pensions, no care homes and no health services. Anyone over-60 must take a kind of OAP MOT. Failure means on-the-spot euthanasia.

The elderly have become the underclass. Norma (Marlene Sidaway), 77, bosses an estate from her moth-eaten recliner, brandishing the fake permit that claims she’s 39. Her home-help Joy (Sadie Shimmin), a spritely 59, offers hand-jobs for sliced bread and pushes prescription drugs around the infirm. It’s a tidy sideline that keeps them in meat sandwiches – so long as the odd child stumbles along. "Windfall", they cackle.

It's a society that over-prizes childhood: Maya (Milly Thomas), today's unfortunate, arrives wrapped in everything but cotton wool; kneepads, cycle helmet, bubble-wrap clothing. She’s due to take her adulthood test tomorrow, on her 18th birthday, but she’s still mollycoddled by her father Noah (Steve Hansell), a utility man going door-to-door to check health permits on a standard zero-hour contract. She’s scooped up by Helen, the local drug addict, 70-going-on-17.

It’s a black pudding of a play, as dark and sweet as Philip Ridley or Martin McDonagh, but way more naïve. Like Lucy Kirkwood’s Tinderbox, another dystopian satire that drives characters to cannibalism, its world doesn’t quite add up. Early imprecisions lead into all kinds of knotty implausibilities – not least a system for organised euthanasia carried out by unchecked individuals, using pen and paper. In 2046.

There are bigger tangles. If society’s aging, it’s because people are healthier and fitter for longer – yet here those over 70 are ailing and 60-plus is past-it. Criminally, Adams doesn’t understand aging at all. She seems to think that we magically change into little-old-people with little-old-people tastes; as if, at 65, one suddenly develops a penchant for antimacassars and print newspapers. That’s not how it works. We don’t go into reverse. We just stop keeping up. Joy would be 28 in 2015. She’s not going to forsake the internet for a Chambers Dictionary.

Animals might outwardly profess to be standing up for the elderly, but, in actual fact, it’s wringing them for comic mileage. "Ha, ha, ha", it says, "Imagine crinklies on speed. Imagine them running gangs". It strips these women of their dignity and, by making them hapless cannibals, peddles the same suspicion that would, pushed to its max, lead to the very ostracisation she portrays.

It’s best read as a satire on austerity, not aging. Mass euthanasia takes welfare cuts to the nth degree: rather than cutting claimants benefits, why not simply cut the claimants themselves? Noah’s careless corruption is down to the precariousness of his contract, while Maya’s symptomatic of a society that keeps its young adults as kids. As drama, though, it’s a shambles, so heavily signposted that we’re always several steps ahead.

Lisa Cagnacci's production can’t sort out its flaws. Max Dorey’s design, though spatially intelligent, doesn’t stack up: Norma’s home should be 2015-gone-to-seed, not unchanged since 1956. Max Pappenheim’s Gameboy soundscape comes from nowhere; ditto Katherine Murray-Clark’s videos. Milly Thomas is woefully miscast as Maya – too old by a mile, robbing the play of its most beautiful image, a young girl and an old woman, hand in hand – but Cara Chase makes a mischievous old-junky and Marlene Sidaway’s a lively battleaxe. All in all, though, not so much raw talent as undercooked.

Animals runs at Theatre503 until 2 May