E-mail to a friend Find tickets

The War Next Door

Published Wednesday 7 February 2007 at 15:35 by Jason Best

Tamsin Oglesby’s satirical black comedy explores the perils of liberal intervention in today’s globalised world from an unusual perspective - the battleground is the home front and the antagonists are London neighbours.

Lorraine Burroughs’ Soph and David Michaels’ Max are the epitome of a modern, middle-class couple. She’s into ecology, he’s a lawyer who grows his own dope. Their relationship with the immigrants next door lurches uneasily from self-conscious chumminess and unconscious condescension but when they come to believe that Jonathan Coyne’s bullish Ali is battering his wife (Badria Timimi’s reticent Hana), they feel obliged to act. The trouble is, they’re not quite sure how.

There’s a germ of an interesting idea in Oglesby’s play but unfortunately the execution is as muddled as the actions of her would-be do-gooders. One moment Oglesby is sending up well-heeled Soph and Max’s green pretensions, the next she is saddling them with didactic speeches about domestic violence, rape and misogyny. Ali and Hana fare even worse. Their background is kept diplomatically vague, which wouldn’t matter if their personalities weren’t equally fuzzy.

Bizarrely, Oglesby has her characters speak in verse. Now and then, there is a flash of epigrammatic wit - the line “I’m not interested in the law, I’m a barrister,” gets a deserved laugh but most of the dialogue is laboured and dull. Nicolas Kent’s direction only compounds the play’s problems, introducing such stylised touches as a ghetto blaster standing in for a baby, a device that is more irritating than illuminating. Only Libby Watson’s elegantly spare design can be counted a categorical success. As her simple set slides back and forth between the homes, it cleverly conveys one couple’s chic, open plan minimalism and the other’s scant means.

E-mail to a friend Find tickets