Low Level Panic (Orange Tree Theatre, 4 March)

God bless the Orange Tree, really and truly, for consistently the smartest selection of plays I've seen in London. When I recommend them to friends, as I always do, I say that this is a proper theatre: handsomely-mounted, thoughtful productions. Their commitment to interesting but less-performed plays is simply invaluable: I suspect I would never have seen Mustapha Matura's Play Mas, or (in a very different vein) Shaw's Widower's Houses, at least in proper productions, were it not for their interventions.

If I were trying to be provocative, I would say that this play, from 1998, was about the Internet: specifically, about pornography and Internet dating, only before either of these were anything like mainstreamed. It really isn't: it's about relationships among women, and particularly the ubiquity of male desire in a certain kind of straight, pan-middle-class female life.

And this is where my reservations about the piece begin. Along with Seventeen, this is the second piece of theatre I saw this week in which no characters exceeded their types--that is, presented no idiosyncrasies, no signs of individual life beyond being twenty-somethings having sexualised, desired, desiring, problematic bodies. I honestly do not know if anyone actually has hourlong conversations with their mates in the bathroom, particularly when one of said mades is naked. But I do know that people tend to be weird in a way that the characters in this play were not. I thought, again, of the Bechdel Test: I don't know that the characters in here were ever free of Talking About Sex and Appearance. And of course this is, I would say somewhat laboriously, the play's point. But, just as the laughs in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern made the core of existential angst seem all the more powerful, some sense of these people as individuals would have heightened the play's stakes. It's hard to mourn lost or abandoned individuality if the play doesn't itself seem very interested in these things.

Everyone appearing in this was great--but they had to put up with a very laboured script and--again--little chance to be more than a type. I particularly felt sorry for Sophie Melville, who had the play the most panicked, most middle-class, most troubled of the three women. This was as I have come to expect from the theatre an all-out, dedicated staging, and I appreciate the seriousness with which the production addressed what was in the script. Having Mary, her character, climb the set at various moments felt appropriate to the character's need to live with the aftermath of a sexual assault. These actions were just set in the midst of a landscape of pretty mundane-seeming concerns: it's easy to get sex, but hard to get a boyfriend; my flatmates keep leaving their stuff in the bathroom. This disjunction is of course on some level the point--and I admired the staging's commitment to showing that, on some level, this was an experience this character could not move past. But I wish more had been there: that they play had itself had a more expansive account of what women's lives might be like.