Holy Sh!t at Kiln, review: The new theatre's a hit; shame the opening play is half baked
I hope when the Houses of Parliament get refurbished to the tune of several billions some bright spark from the world of brand management doesn’t insist that what the Palace of Westminster really needs after it reopens is a swanky new name to make it more relevant and cred – Freedom Central, say, or The Shouty House.
An object lesson in spurious re-nomenclature is to be found on the Kilburn High Road, north London where, after a £7m renovation, the much-loved, much-respected Tricycle Theatre has flung open its doors, proclaiming itself as the Kiln Theatre.
Ken Chubb - the man who, in 1970, co-founded the lunch-time theatre company (Wakefield Tricycle) that got the ball rolling – and Nicolas Kent, the artistic director who put “the Trike” on the map during his 28-year tenure, joined a dozen former board members in signing a public letter of protest about the move this month. And outside Kiln (a pun on Kilburn, geddit?) on the opening night of Holy Sh!t, the baptismal premiere for the reborn venue, directed by under-fire artistic director Indhu Rubasingham, was a placard-wielding gaggle of aggrieved locals, who’ve denounced the sacrilegious name-switch as a ‘tragedy’.
That, too, is over-kill (over-Kiln?). It’s just a big pity, more like. Given the opulence of the re-furb (a far superior auditorium, sophisticated foyer enhancements, and crème de la crème toilet facilities), I suspect that the good-will elicited from audiences will damp down any smouldering resentments, but the whole damaging carry-on seems needless.
As indeed (again I write more out of mystification than anger) does Alexis Zegerman’s comedy about two fortysomething couples, supposedly friends, who come to trade insults and blows over their rivalrous drive to send their respective daughters to a sought-after local Christian primary school.
Given the lengths some parents in London will go to in order to secure the right place for their little darling – fixating on catchment areas, wooing the school in question – the subject offers easy pickings of topicality, satire and psychological drama at the expense of the pushy middle-classes (and their malodorous snobberies and hypocrisies). But after two hours in the fractious company of Nick, Juliet, Sam and Simone, you’re left feeling it’s not just the characters who are blowing things out of proportion.
Using the bold starting-point premise that Jewish Simone has opted to give herself a Christian make-over, lustily singing in church, denying her identity – to the increasing bemusement of her atheist partner Sam and ultimate wrath of Juliet – Zegerman wedges all manner of differences into the resulting schism: a bit about race (Nick is black, Juliet white, trying with little joy for another baby), a bit about gender (the men are less bothered than the women, for good and ill).
In terms of escalation, adults behaving like children, there are parallels to Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage – even including an acrimonious falling-out when the tots (never seen) wind up at loggerheads. Yet Nick’s final cries – despairing for the future in a world “obsessed by difference” – are plainly intended to ring out across the turbulent streets of the capital and Britain.
They can’t – because, for all Zegerman’s success in keeping us watching, the characters sound too much like mouth-pieces and the piece feels too hermetic, a shallow exerciserather than a deep exploration, the themes a convenience rather than a burning necessity. Rubasingham directs with flair, the cast (Daon Broni, Claire Goose, Daniel Lapaine and Dorothea Myer-Bennett) perform with strenuous commitment (with fine work from the latter as Simone). The theatre's a hit, the show's a bit of a m!ss. Roll on, next month, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.
Until Oct 6. Tickets: 020 7328 1000; kilntheatre.com
