Pornography (London & Bath)

Sean Holmes’ production is a brilliant exercise in good old Brechtian alienation. Inflamed monologues merge with isolated sound bites. The designer Paul Wills has turned the stage into an extension of a tube train, lights hanging in neon strips, the participatory sound engineer evoking Coldplay’s “Yellow” as an alternative national anthem.

There’s a schoolboy who has problems, including the hots for his teacher. There’s the grown- up female pupil who is drawn back to her male professor (I sensed Stephens trying to re-write David Mamet’s Oleanna while sculpting his text; that’s another play). And there’s the old widowed biddy with strong views – beautifully done by Sheila Reid – and, at the heart of the play, the inquisitive, blooming incestuous relationship of a brother and sister.

The most powerful moment is Kirsty Bushell’s outburst when her sibling, whom she’s exposed as a sexual life-line (Sam Spruell is both bravely naked and eloquent in this role) and thought was dead, walks right in; she’d been waiting for him to ring as London sleep-walked through disaster.

Stephens counterpoints these snapshots with the slow, poetically appreciative progress of a bomber through a countryside he actually loves. It’s not a question of sympathy for the devil; it’s a notion of satirically challenging his motives for destruction.

Anthony Welsh plays this avenger with light empathy – but what’s to like about these people, you may well ask? – while Sarah Solemani and Sam Graham as the academic couple, Frances Ashman as a harassed office worker and the remarkable Billy Seymour as the adolescent pupil, are superbly articulated versions of souls at sea in a cruel world, about to be made even more so. It’s a brilliant piece, strange, hypnotic, unsettling.