Catch ( Archived )

Reviews

4 stars Four Stars

Ian Shuttleworth, The Financial Times, 7/12/2006

The best Royal Court plays comment keenly on the way we live both within ourselves as individuals and collectively, either in small specific groups or wider society. On that score, this unusual piece of work stands up well. Protagonist Claire is an identity consultant, helping victims of identity theft to recover a sense of self-possession, people who want to improve their credit rating by re-tailoring their socio-economic profile, etc.

Through her we are shown that to all practical intents we are the data on us: on what we buy, where we live; we are how we are seen. Literally so: the play takes place alternately in Claire’s office and in an underpass outside, a dark and violent place despite CCTV cameras. Britain is now notoriously the most electronically surveilled country in the world; the average town-dweller may be recorded by more than 300 cameras in a day. Yet far from this increasing our safety, the play suggests that there may be a generation which, having grown up with this concept, engages in violence precisely because they will be witnessed doing so – hence the use of phone cameras to record attacks.

This is a vast and potentially arid canvas, yet through Claire (Tanya Moodie), her young work-experience intern, her clients, casual lover and the teenage underpass underclass, the writers keep matters vital without, for the most part, getting confused or confusing. Writers, plural: for as part of the Court’s 50th-anniversary celebrations it has revisited its occasional 1970s project of collaborative writing. April de Angelis, Stella Feehily, Tanika Gupta, Chloe Moss and Laura Wade each drafted two scenes which were then collectively worked into a whole.

What is conspicuous is the lack of tonal inconsistency (apart from a poetic monologue near the end which sticks out like a dislocated thumb): Polly Teale’s traverse staging keeps matters uniformly astringent, and appropriately, lets the banks of audience watch each other as well as the events onstage. I could have done with some palpable sense of conclusion, but that really isnt so important here. Just as Dennis Kelly’s Love and Money at the Young Vic makes for an imaginative yet sharp indictment of the climate of consumer credit, so the CATCH collective ably pin the perils of the informational side of consumer culture. 3 stars Three Stars

Sam Marlowe, The Times, 7/12/2006

Five female playwrights contributed their distinctive voices to this, the last work in the Royal Court’s 50th anniversary year. Echoing a collaborative process employed at the Court in the early 1970s, CATCH, by April de Angelis, Stella Feehily, Tanika Gupta, Chloe Moss and Laura Wade, is a fascinating mess. Directed by Polly Teale, it’s a broken-legged spider of a drama lurking in a tattered web of plot, erratic, yet so watchful and alive with menace that you can’t tear your eyes away from it.

Identity is the preoccupation of a piece that is part thriller, part sharp social analysis, part urban dystopian nightmare. In a Britain where each individual’s every action and transaction is monitored, recorded and evaluated, Claire runs a consultancy that repairs the profile of those deemed socially inferior and undesirable. Beneath her shiny office is a grim underpass roamed by feral youngsters who film their attacks on innocent passersby on their mobile phones. Maya, a bright teenager on work-experience placement, longs to be just like her well-heeled, confident boss; but Claire herself is not all she seems.

The play bursts with topicality. Maya finds the government’s proposed ID-card scheme sinister, while her Muslim friend Fatima, regarded with suspicion because of her faith, speaks disparagingly of ‘fundies’ (fundamentalists) and says her own headscarf is just a protest vote. The mugging and stalking of Claire’s client Andrea points up how much information about herself a woman carries around in her handbag, while to Claire, the handbag itself – high street, not Hermes – instantly labels Andrea middle-class, middle-income and unremarkable.

In her harvesting of information about those who come asking for her help, Claire displays a chilling kinship both with Andrea’s stalker and with the faceless, soulless agencies who keep tabs on the population for commercial or security purposes. And alienation underlies the thuggery of the street gangs, to whom a mobile phone video image is a means of reinforcing a sense of self.

Numerous underdeveloped characters and narrative strands dangle maddeningly from the writing, and, perhaps inevitably, you can often see the joins between one playwright’s contribution and another’s.

But Teale’s production is taut and supremely well-acted; and for all its tangles and holes, CATCH has a riveting and unsettling urgency.