Review – Tribes, Royal Court Theatre

To paraphrase Lloyd Grossman,”Who’d want to live in a house like this?”

Unsurprisingly some of the Royal Court audience had taken a break from their middle class, liberal-minded domiciles to recognise themselves on stage, laughing appreciatively when ghastly, opinionated academic pater Christopher (Stanley Townsend) asks his returned-to-nesters when they were going to f*ck off.

Review – Over There by Mark Ravenhill, Royal Court

One thing’s for sure: when the Whingers eventually get around to putting their money where their humongous mouths are and writing their own play, it will have a snappy title.

They’ve already got a swathe of clever, witty names for their magnum opus; in fact they were tossing a few around only the other day. But since these pages are read by well-known and budding playwrights desperately seeking displacement activity and filling in the empty hours generously donated to them in the name of writer’s block, we are unable to risk sharing them with you here.

The only thing stopping us is that we just don’t have a theme, a plot or even an idea. Just some titles.

Mark Ravenhill is no stranger to memorable and arresting titles.  In fact, wasn’t his career launched on the controversy of Shopping and F**king – the most Christian Bale of all play titles – before everyone got controversial and started inserting asterisks in their headings?.

Anyway, on this occasion he has disappointingly come up with one of those really anodyne hard-to-remember, hard-to-Google titles: Over There. Most people – like the Whingers – seem to be referring to it as “that play with the twins in” or simply “the twins play”.