Topless Mum needs humour's injection

Confused inquiry: Kennedy (Sylvestra le Touzel) questions Mitch (Jason Deer), a soldier just back from Afghanistan
10 April 2012

You can catch the essence of Ron Hutchinson’s vacuous and naive satire about tabloid newspapers, the tricks of photography and the brutality of fighting men, in a speech given to a black British soldier. Jason Deer’s worried Mitch, returned from Afghanistan, faces the questions of Sylvestra Le Touzel’s military lawyer and struggles to understand her: "There’s a photo and he says he’s on it even though he isn’t on it but he says he is and Barry took it and it’s summat to do wi’ me, only it were Barry that took it, only he didn’t, is that it?" The only answer to the question is yes, though the convolutions of the preposterous plot take about a hundred dull minutes to do the full convoluting business.

Hutchinson, judging by his incoherent ramble of a programme note, harnesses Topless Mum to a pair of related, banal and simplistic notions: that photos can be manipulated to distort the truth and words are "slippery". As if to illustrate these obvious facts he constructs a narrative of a tabloid newspaper taken for a ride when offered a photo that purports to show British soldiers brutalising an Afghan. The man who does the offering, Alistair Wilkinson in powerful form as Barry, a horribly injured Yorkshire squaddie, and his brighter wife, Louise Kempton’s Tiffany, often adopting an impenetrable accent, appear to be deceivers. As in real life The Mirror was tricked into publishing hoax photos, so here.

One improbability follows hot, or rather fairly cold, upon another. This is no surprise since Hutchinson clearly has almost zero knowledge when it comes to how contemporary journalists talk or behave. Indeed, tabloid hacks may enjoy going to laugh at how Topless Mum gets it wrong. "Once in a while a story comes along...that reminds you of why you wanted to be a journo," Emma Lowndes’s flamboyantly unlifelike reporter earnestly tells the editor (an insipid Giles Fagan). The journalists’ tactics, after discovering they have made false allegations, do not conform to newspaper behaviour, but eventually lead to the fuzzily explained truth. Caroline Hunt’s production on an almost bare stage, at whose back stands the curved shape of the container in which an Afghan was murdered, needs humour’s injection.

The play’s title may smack of randiness but Topless Mum never really lays anything bare.

Until 28 June. Information: 020 7328 1000.

Topless Mum
Tricycle Theatre
Kilburn High Road, NW6 7JR

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