Autobahn (King's Head)

If cars are, as the philosopher Jean Baudrillard suggests, ‘nothing but the immense metaphor of life’ – the premier of Neil LaBute‘s Autobahn at the King’s Head should offer the fast track to anyone interested in scouting through the mind of one of America’s most popular but divisive playwrights.

It’s not however a comfortable watch; the ten are dolts, the women are vacuously amoral and the cars are simply pressure cookers for the broiling of latent desires. There are some good jokes here but also some long draughts from the exhaust pipe of despair.

That Autobahn has taken a decade to reach the UK in spite of a glittery debut run in New York (the original cast included Philip Seymour Hoffman and Peter Dinklage among others) should provide a warning. Autobahn‘s septuple of pieces, all conversations with different characters set across the front seats of American cars, are intermittently funny, but also highly repetitive and ultimately somewhat sour. In several pieces, while one character speaks the other remains almost totally passive: a trapped audience to their partner’s usually outraged, exculpations.

The trajectories of the rants are similarly repetitive. Regardless of their circumstances, they move from initial self-doubt to settled self-satisfaction. And LaBute’s own stylistic tics reveal themselves. Each story includes the etymological dissection of a common word, the balance of power is always flipped once, and no one ever shouts back. The last thing these road trips offer are any sense of escape. The passengers in LaBute’s ineluctably trapped in themselves with a view straight into the abyss.

The only pieces with actual conversations include Autobahn‘s worst and best pieces. In Merge, a sub-Woody Allen skit as tedious as a student revue, a cuckolded husband feebly challenges his wife after picking her up from an airport. By contrast Road Trip, a glimpse at a father driving his young daughter from boarding school to a secluded holiday cabin, is creepily hypnotic. Without seeming sensationalist it obliquely depicts an act of paedophiliac grooming with a horrifying plausibility. Yet even in these pieces the encounters never quite happen head-on: the philandering wife never removes her sunglasses, the daughter is an innocent unequipped for revolt.

Savio(u)r Productions' use of four actors over the fourteen parts only emphasises the general lack of variety. Henry Everett and Zoe Swenson-Graham have strong moments and Tim Sullivan’s direction is swift and unfussy, but the minimal changes to costume and some occasionally wavering accents mean that few of the roles seem really inhabited. And the set is a touch disappointing with no great sense of a car’s physical restrictions. The cutaway BMW where every story takes place has no seat belts, side windows or roof and seems unreal.

Ultimately the lack of variety keeps LaBute’s vehicle jammed in something in third gear. And over seven juddering misanthropic laps you may find exhilaration giving way to nausea.