About 15 minutes into this quite astonishingly misjudged show, I started to wonder if Starbucks had slipped something into my pre-theatre latté. Was I really watching six decent performers, including stage-debut-making Sophia Myles and comedian Rufus Hound, in something that resembled a late-night student revue gone hideously awry? Wearing white-face make-up and pretending to be “wise fools” after the blueprint for Utopia? And had writers including Dylan Moran and Simon Stephens really contributed to this disaster? Unbelievably, yes. The format of the punishingly long evening is a series of sketches, each one slightly worse than the last, from which no writer emerges with any credit. They’re a bewildering grab-bag of the glib and facile — a good life means a perfect cup of coffee? Dammit, call Hallmark Cards! — and for a piece that’s meant to be worrying at the notion of a perfect world, they’re incredibly depressing too. What’s even worse is that directors Steve Marmion and Max Roberts, two men who ought to know better, have chopped the scenes up so like a novel form of water torture we keep being forced to return to the Spaceship for Humanity (or something) and to the crotchety former MP. Or rather, the scenes keep repeating on us, like a noxious takeaway.
All I know is, Utopia was the curtain call.
Utopia runs until July 14 (020 7478 0100, sohotheatre.com).
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