Thomas Eccleshare is a quirky, off-the-wall writer. In Pastoral, seen at the HighTide festival in 2013, he created black comedy out of impending ecological disaster. Now he has written a sci-fi satire about our vain search for programmed perfection. While the play is sharply funny and ingeniously staged, it doesn’t always supply the emotional evidence to reinforce its intellectual arguments.
The basic situation is simple: Hari and Max, husband and wife, respectively, are a nice suburban couple who decide to create an ideal flatpack son out of constituent parts. It gradually emerges that their first son, Nick, died of drug addiction. They assemble a replacement, Jan, who conforms to social norms and whose ideas and attitudes can be determined through a remote control. Since Nick and Jan are played by the same actor, a contrast is drawn between the fallible humanity of the one and the machine-tooled precision of the other. Needless to say, predetermined perfection proves to be an impossible dream.
As a graduate of the Jacques Lecoq school of physical theatre, Eccleshare comes out of a different box from most British playwrights, but I was struck by his similarity to Alan Ayckbourn. In Ayckbourn’s Henceforward (1987), we saw a composer serviced by an android to whom he related more easily than people; and in Comic Potential (1998), TV soaps were populated by computerised robots. There is one particular scene in Eccleshare’s play, when Jan hilariously disrupts a suburban dinner party, that I suspect his forebear would have been delighted to have written. Eccleshare also has the capacity to link the dystopian and the diurnal, as in Hari and Max’s compulsion to compete with their neighbours, who constantly brag about their own high-flying offspring’s achievements.
What Eccleshare has to say is true and relevant: we should love people for what they are rather than for what we wish them to be. The action, however, doesn’t always back up the argument, especially in the scenes involving Nick, whose descent into addiction is never motivated or explained. We are clearly meant to assume that, as parents, Max and Hari have failed due to their inability to cope with messy reality. But we don’t learn enough about Nick, in spite of a speech from the girl next door praising his potential, to know whether he was a victim of parental pressure or social circumstance.
Even if there is a hole at the play’s heart, it has been assembled by director Hamish Pirie and designer Cai Dyfan as cleverly as the machine-made Jan: scenes that are glimpsed through a rectangular aperture whisk by on a travelator before the set opens up to show us the suburban jungle. Jane Horrocks captures excellently the trim conformity and residual guilt of the maternal Max, while Mark Bonnar suggests the trouble with Hari is that he believes you can build the perfect son out of DIY fervour. Jason Barnett and Michele Austin are equally good as the boastful neighbours. Brian Vernel is outstanding as both the flawed Nick and the mechanised Jan who, as someone observes, has his head screwed on the right way. Yet while the play aims some deft blows at our desire for an unrealisable perfection and is well worth seeing, its own flaws are all too apparent.
• At the Royal Court, London, until 19 May. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
