The Royal Court kicks off a boldly international season of new work – a sort of anti-Brexit programme, if you will – with this eccentric drama from Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón.
I suppose the easiest way of describing it is it’s a comedy about terrorism. As it begins, two mild-mannered young women – Marcella (Aimée-Ffion Edwards) and Alejandra (Danusia Samal) – are trying to get rid of their infuriatingly nosy neighbour Carmen (a scene-stealing Sarah Niles) so that they can usher in Paul Kaye’s jaded bombmaker José Miguel.
It’s kind of fascinating and often funny, but I did wonder where exactly it was going. Calderón wrote it as a response to a strange campaign of late-night, largely non-lethal anarchist bombings that took place in his country. Receiving its world premiere in a barebones production using British actors with British accents, the Chilean context feels remote. With a lack of any other context, the group seem curiously old-fashioned, detached from current Western debates about radicalism and terrorism.
But then it gets bogged down in a series of rambling metaphysical speeches that kind of feel like an over-ambitious attempt to cram it all into an Orwellian framework, topped with a bombastic ending that would seem to completely fly in the face of the real-life context.
I read Doris Lessing’s phenomenal ‘The Good Terrorist’ not so long ago, and it feels like that says everything ‘B’ does, but vastly more successfully. Nonetheless, ‘B’ boasts great performances and an enjoyably mischievous sense of humour – even if it never really goes off with a bang.