Dumb Show Royal Court, London SW1
Embedded Riverside Studios, London W6
Bat Boy: The Musical Shaftesbury, London WC2
Right from the start, Barry, at the centre of Joe Penhall's new play, Dumb Show, has the look of someone caught red-faced in the middle of his life. The early diagnosis is merely that he is a hasbeen comedian. On the table in front of him is a prominently placed bowl of bananas, like a bunch of untold jokes. But Barry is about to slip on something far worse than any banana skin.
He has been invited to a swanky hotel by two journalists impersonating private bankers, who will stop at nothing in their pursuit of a story, and trick him into revealing a drug habit. There is much to laugh at here but these corvine journalists themselves have an absolute lack of humour and imagination. It would be nice to believe that they were unconvincing.
And by the end of the play, they are. Joe Penhall's drama is brilliantly written and shaped - and unpeels with a flourish - but it would have been even more interesting had he made the comedian and the journalists less polarised. If the journalists had been allowed more lapses into humanity (by my count, they had one each), the piece would have had a less crudely satirical dynamic.
But then the satire is meant to bite deep - and it does. And as Barry, Douglas Hodge is fantastic. His face is a confessional even when he is not speaking. He inspires desperate sympathy on his account. And his inarticulacy is funnier than any of his weary wisecracks. After a major raid on the hotel's minibar, he starts out on a sentence: 'Outspokenness is the new...' The new what ? He can't think. He has not, as yet, been forced to speak out himself. When he offers drugs to Anna Maxwell Martin's Liz, it is not an exciting scoop. It is a sad, homely moment. 'So go on, dig in,' he says kindly as if offering her a helping of shepherd's pie.
Anna Maxwell Martin's skinny, Mephistophelean Liz is a marvel of bathos, gormlessness and calculation. She is at her best when her character is at its worst, exhibiting a thrill at the wicked spin she is hoping to put on Barry's story. Rupert Graves, as her cohort Greg, is as ghastly as he needs to be, a nightmare, hectoring from his bogus moral high ground.
The swish set (designer Es Devlin) employs minimalism to maximum effect. This is a glassy hotel in which no one need feel inhibited about throwing stones. And through its shining doors a series of false horizons may be glimpsed. Terry Johnson's production is taut, elegant and properly unrelenting. Joe Penhall, who is a very funny writer, makes us think hard about what constitutes a good joke, what makes a 'good story'.
Tim Robbins extends the second question in Embedded, his big-hearted, sincere, simplistic satire about US journalists who went to Iraq with US troops. He wants audiences to consider the provenance of political narrative. Who is in charge of the story? He shows US journalists being drilled into deceit by the military (and, by default, the Pentagon). But his journalists, unlike Joe Penhall's, are not villains. They get off lightly, their integrity never called into question as it should be. In fact, a couple of them emerge as heroes of the hour. And the show is at its most interesting when these reporters break ranks to tell the truth.
Robbins has been mocked for glorying in his status as an activist movie star. But he deserves respect for putting his head above the Hollywood parapet with such aplomb. His company, the Actors' Gang, are committed and sympathetic. It is a pity, though, that there is not more finesse to the story Robbins himself tells. His satire does not go deep. Rumsfeld and his colleagues are a gallery of masked grotesques. By turning them into shrill, obscene puppets, he removes the more interesting possibility of studying their warped humanity.
Bat Boy is the worst show I have seen in the theatre for years. It is so bad it is almost good (there was disbelieving laughter from those able to see the funny side on the first night). Duty alone kept me in my seat beyond the interval. It is not the actors' fault - they sing gutsily. But Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming's weak musical about a freak boy - half- human, half-bat - doesn't know which emotional chords to strike. It is gothic without any satisfying horror included, ploddingly ironic, full of unearned sentimentality, a freakshow with no chic. Deven May's bloodsucking Bat Boy looks like an old Pokémon card. Madeline Herbert's set is a depressing, ugly, muddy mess. Laurence O'Keefe's music is terrible. You can't make a silk purse out of a bat's ear.
