Summer at Edinburgh's Fringe

In August, Edinburgh is taken over by Festivals. Loads of them. Dozens. More festivals than any city has a right to enjoy in so short a space of time. Frankly, it's sickening...but also brilliantly exciting.

It all starts in July (with the International Film Festival in June), technically, but most events happen in August. There's the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival, the Edinburgh Art Festival, the Edinburgh International Festival, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, the Edinburgh Mela, and - of course - the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

The city gets busy, expensive, and very happening. It's a gorgeous city, so I'm willing to let it off being so sickenly Festivalised. And yes, that is a real word...probably.

To keep on top of what's going on in Edinburgh this Summer, keep an eye on these sites:

ThreeWeeks, who cover most of what happens,
http://www.threeweeks.co.uk/edinburgh/edaily.html

and

Fringe Review, who select what they review.

Both will be carrying reviews by me this year - which is stupidly exciting.

Say it with Flowers at Hull Truck

Sometimes, every older person must make way for younger ones. Fresh blood has an irresistible allure, and eventually – hard as it may be – the older ones must move aside.

It's a hard fact of life, but one that must be learnt by the am dram group in Jane Thornton's new Hull Truck play, Say it with Flowers. The OAP thesps have lost their church hall rehearsal space to a young dance class, as the church hopes to give the young people 'a chance'. Mavis (61), of the Parish Players, is unimpressed with this and wonders who is giving the older people 'a chance'. She hasn't learnt that life lesson yet – despite her 61 years – nor does she realise that she's had her whole life for her chance, and has spent ten good years having that chance. Maybe it is time she let the kids have a go.

The lesson of young blood's appeal also needs to be learnt at Hull Truck itself. Without wanting to get back on the soapbox...Say it with Flowers is another safe Truck main stage play, their standard fare. It's a well-made play, one tailored to the Truck's loyal audience, one that does what you'd expect, ie. it gets laughs while telling its story. But it's hardly daring, innovative or new.

Artistic Director John Godber has directed his wife's play, which features a Hull couple whose marriage becomes increasingly shaky under suburban pressures. Another late middle-aged/elderly couple has one member house-bound by illness. There's a gay thespy-type – brilliant James Hornsby has fun being subtly camp – who seems to be prejudiced against and single. On the edges, a young Goth is at college. For the first time, I wondered if a major Hull Truck character would ever go off to University, or fall in love, or try to get an apprenticeship, or go house-hunting or clubbing. Or anything a young person would do. It seems that, at present, any main Hull Truck character on their main stage has to be at least 45 and is probably in a failing marriage rather than doing anything likely to lead to a wedding.

Don't get me wrong: as ever, Hull Truck has a solid, creditable production on its hands, one that keeps the laughs rippling and isn't scared to unleash pent-up suburban fury. The plot is pretty sedate, and Thornton seems content to let it trickle along rather than pick up any speed – despite sudden shifts is conversations. The set – as they often are at the Truck – is detailed and all-encompassing, spot-on, in fact. But we're still got a middle-class, middle-aged Hull onstage. Now, I live in that city, and there are an awful lot of people not in that category. Hull Truck is brilliant at showing the audience themselves onstage – that's why they keep coming back (some women behind me even talked about golf – how sedate and middle-of-the-road!) – but I for one would be much more impressed if every now and then those people saw someone else onstage.

On the night I went, the auditorium was barely half-full – the Truck surely can't afford to sell so few seats in their new venue. It looks like the theatre must learn the same lessons as the Parish Players.

4:48 Psychosis at the Young Vic (Fringe Review practice)

*** A focussed and static monologue performance of Sarah Kane's final play.

Troubled Sarah Kane wrote only five stage plays in her short life, and killed herself just after finishing this one: 4:48 Psychosis. Naturally, some have come to see it as a suicide note, especially passages about self-harm, depression and suicide. On the page, it can be a harrowing read, but the Young Vic's taut staging somehow misses the pain and torment that should drip from every word.

Anamaria Marinca, with director Christian Bendetti, take the script of 4:48 and turn it into a book-length acting audition speech. That works as a way of presenting both the text and a range of emotion under tight scrutiny. But it's a stripped-back performance that strips back a little too far, and loses all context for Kane's words.

The script itself is a tumult of many voices, competing to be heard and vying for attention. This is probably an aspect of some central character's mania – her psychosis – from which she is able to break free at 4:48am each day, until 6am. Marinca sometimes allows these voices to gabble along, almost rushing ahead of themselves, but always restraining them just enough to make every word perfectly clear – not a word is lost. At other times, she allows them space to breathe, to drip out as she pleases, or resisting as they force their way out against her will.

But she never moves an inch. She never strays from her allocated slot on the bare, wood-panelled stage – her biggest movements requiring only that she briefly raise a foot. Attention homes in on her pale face and wasted body, worringly thin and not wearing a bra. But any scope for movement or change from the sight of Marinca is mercilessly refused breathing space. Despite the open expanse of stage, this is a very constricted production. Even changes of lighting are limited to what feel like odd bits of playing about towards the end, included just so that the LX operator had something to do.

Marinca captures the anger of Kane's writing, but doesn't manage to give it a direction; it bleeds out all over the place, just as it seems her character should, but never does. It's not that power is lacking, just a form for it to take. There's no context to what's being said, and this production is almost just an opportunity to show that Marinca is capable of learning the entire script (which needn't be spoken by just one actor, but any number at all). There's none of the pain and anguish, nor the darkness, that Kane naturally contains.

If 4:48 is about anything, it's about self-hate and rejected love. Those are the causes of the underlying pain and anger in Kane's writing. Marinca and Bendetti have tried to show those two things with only one person on stage, and it just isn't enough. Those words exist in a vacuum.

Troilus and Cressida at Shakespeare's Globe

Who knew Shakespeare could be so homo-erotic?

It's probably because he's writing about the Greek army camping around the ancient city of Troy – and back then the Greeks had a bit of a reputation for all that man-on-man stuff. Mind, it's perhaps a reputation they've picked up in more recent times, rather than one they had at the time; these days we find the Greek system of male mentoring a bit odd. A system open to corruption and paedophilia, one that allows older men privileged access to young boys.

Special access is exactly what Matthew Kelly's unashamedly camp Pandarus has to Paul Stocker's cherubic Troilus at Shakespeare's Globe. Okay, they're doomed Trojans, not Greeks, but the same ideals seem to be in place – in fact these supposed foes meet often and seem to have a great deal in common, which just goes to show the futility of this war fought over willing abductee Helen. Pandarus arranges for Troilus to marry Cressida – a woman rather fancied in both camps, even by the effeminate, Russell Brand-style Achilles (Trystan Gravelle) – who is his niece. What's alarming about Kelly's patronage here is that – when told Cressida must be handed over to the Greeks in exchange for a captured Trojan noble – his fears are for Troilus, not his own niece. She's liable to be raped and kept as a slave, a woman loved by a prince of Troy, and her uncle cares more that his protege will be upset to lose his lover.

But then, in such a patriarchal society with male mentoring (called pedastry, fact fans), maybe the surprise ought to be that Troilus fancies a girl in the first place. Even the Greek ladyboys Achilles and Patroclus are rather taken with her, which seems to run against Shakespeare's decidedly un-Homeric description of Patroclus as Achilles' 'masculine whore'.

Shakespeare makes Achilles bisexual, rather than a heterosexual man with a male protege (as the Greeks would have seen him), a move extended by the Globe in their boisterously Boy's Own production. I say Boy's Own because the few women are either gorgeously sensual and hot for a man or are silly girls that can be easily ignored, while the hard, tough men go around bragging, shouting and bashing each other with sharp things.

Shakespeare's other departure from Homer's original Iliad is to move the focus away from Achilles, indeed away from anyone. The death of Patroclus is skimped over, like many of the revealing costumes, and most of the deaths you might expect from the (literally) legendary Trojan War simply don't happen.

Which just goes to show that these men are all talk and no trousers (ahem). Their fights aren't even as good as the ones in the Globe's Romeo and Juliet! Still, it does let Shakespeare have lots of brawny men clapping each other repeatedly on the muscles.

Dreams of Violence at the Soho Theatre

****
Dreams of Violence isn't really about the dreams Hildy has about throwing her mum down the stairs, though with the way her family get on – or fail to – those dreams are understandable. When Hildy's family telling her they love her worries her more than being held at knifepoint by her own druggie son, you know Stella Feehily's new family tragicomedy has the family side spot-on. Alongside that is Hildy's campaign for the rights of cleaners and the downtrodden. The cleaners are angry at the banker colleagues – but Feehily makes a good case for the bankers' defence, which suddenly makes the whole recession thing a big grey area. That recession mirrors the breaking down of family makes this a clever, witty critique of modern society.

Miss Julie at the Northern Academy of Performing Arts

**

Strindberg's Miss Julie is the play that has a preface in which Strindberg laid out the ground rules for what we would later call Naturalism – a whole room onstage, real people, that sort of thing. It's also supposed to ripple with sexual tension and have power politics bursting through its seams. The Chameleon Players get the first bit (the Naturalism) right, but not the second (the power/sexual politics). This is a workmanlike recital of Strindberg, but that's all. The language that should soar falls flat, the sexual tension collapses in a flaccid whimper. Miss Julie herself is the redeeming angel that does her best with this stolid production, but can't save it.

The Rover at the Southwark Playhouse

On the way out of Looking Glass House Theatre's production (at the Southwark Playhouse) of The Rover, I overheard a woman in the audience sum up her impression of the play to her husband with: Men always get what they want. He agreed.

Now, initially, I'm inclined to think that (spoilers here!) the largely happy ending of Aphra Behn's Restoration comedy of mistaken identity does seem to indicate that the men have all got away with their indiscretions and achieved marital bliss. And because Aphra Behn is one of our most famous – and earliest – female writers, she must have a proto-feminist message here (feminism as we know it not existing in the 1670s). Surely?

However, having heard this couple, I spent the next five minutes thinking of reasons to follow the “Er, hang on a minute” that I almost stopped them with. The thing is, the men emphatically do not get what they want in this play. On the contrary, the women are the winners in the final scene. Of the five female characters, only one has failed to gain anything she wanted at the start. The other four have had great success. Of the men, only one can be said to have gained what he wanted. All of the others have either lost out or been persuaded that what one of the women wants is also what he wants. Another only gets what he wants on condition that another women gets what she wants (and she does).

The inevitable failure of the men to get what they want doesn't stop any of Behn's Restoration fops and young blades (played by a young, swaggering cast) dashing about Venice with a youthful, wily kind of vigour that can't be healthy for extended lengths of time. The sense of relief that the exiled Cavaliers (including the Rover of the title) have avoided death from over-exertion, street duels and syphilis is strongly felt, and not just by those concerned.
That an audience can feel any sympathy at all for the randy Willmore – a helpless servant of beauty – is an achievement in itself. Sam Wilkins' Rover stalks the stage like a dog on heat, boyishly batting aside any attempt to make a decent man of him as he flits grinning from one affair to the next.

He chases women through the gloom of the Playhouse's traverse space, the torches on the wall spluttering to light carnival Venice. If that darkness were a little more complete, it might be easier to forgive the inconsistent application of the rule that no one in a carnival mask can be recognised by anybody – including their best friend or brother. To be honest though, that stretches credulity about as far as does the really rather easy forgiveness doled out by Rebecca Shanks as a butter-wouldn't-melt Florinda. Alright, so such easy forgiveness allows her and her sister to hasten to the marriages they want, but even so...three of her new husband's friends attempting to rape her on separate occasions...and she lets them off? She even gives one to her maid as a husband, with the idea that all of them will now be reformed gentlemen. Florinda and her sister (Natalie Macaluso's engaging, twinkle-eyed Helena) must really want these marriages.

And there it is again. It's the women that scheme for the marriages, not the men. While the men are rushing about drawing swords on one another and chasing skirts through the dusk, the women are plotting and tricking their way to weddings. How well they'll succeed in taming their roving men is another story (perhaps the subject of Behn's sequel some years later).

But sometimes, militant, anti-male feminists can have a habit of seeing violently anti-male messages in places where they simply don't exist. The point here is certainly not that men always get what they want. It is more that they are often violent and inconstant, almost child-like, until they find the right woman to give them a reason to mature. In fact, it's not even really all that feminist – if by feminism we mean something placing greater importance on women than men. It's a lot more even-handed than that, and all the better for it.

Richard III at Telford's Museum of Iron (Fringe Review practice)

**** A typically uplifting Shakespearean offering from the irreverent Oddsocks company.

Once again, this witty touring company take a Shakespeare play that's really a tragedy, and make their audience cheer, boo and – most importantly – laugh. That they do so in the rain is even more impressive.

Even for those of us not sure what to expect from an Oddsocks performance in the gentle drizzle of Telford's Ironbridge Gorge, Andy Barrow's opening line would have given a pretty good indication of what was to come. Perched atop the Oddsocks Tudor travelling cart, wig and false nose in place, the company's director and lead actor in Shakespeare's Richard III announced 'Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun...' Pause. A brief, irritated glance at the lowering clouds above. A briefer, tutting glance at the audience huddling beneath umbrellas. An arm stretched to the stage below him, from which Neal Craig's Edward IV has just departed, and Barrow continues, 'of York.'

Oddoscks is a company very much in tune with their audience and the space in which they perform. Their out-door Richard III demonstrates once again that they aren't scared to ad lib with their classic text, especially to adapt to local circumstances. Buckingham's (Edward Day) promised Earldom of Hereford becomes the (non-existent) Earldom of Telford, and Gloucester and Catesby (Kaitlin Howard) have an ad lib conversation about her wig being dislodged (during this, though probably not other, performances).

On the whole, Oddsocks keep it simple for their modern audience, explaining their characters beforehand and occasionally summing up the story in song form. Their staging is just the field of grass and their incredibly versatile wagon, which has all sorts of flaps and concealed sections ready to represent a bedroom, a prison, a throne room, you name it. Handily, they've also cut down some of the original, as Shakespeare could be a bit wordy at times, and Andy Barrow's adaptation nicely trims some of the fat off this particular bone.

Of course, the biggest challenge with an out-door show is likely to be the weather. On this occasion, the powers that be clearly weren't on the company's side. While the rain poured, the actors carried on, but there were times when the sound of rain on umbrellas drowned them out (no pun intended). Though they soldiered on, I'm sure Oddsocks' players would have had more vim, vigour and success in a sunny performance to an audience squinting in sunlight rather than squirming in rain. Their smiles helped, but a little more could have helped blast the proverbial clouds away earlier. Also, a little more voice work wouldn't go amiss, to avoid actors losing their voices to the vastness of the Ironbridge Gorge. But maybe that's just a venue issue, considering they've always been loud enough in custom-built outdoor spaces.

But, as a performance bringing an under-performed Shakespeare to the public, this succeeds in making it entertaining and funny while staying true to the original story and characterisation. That so bloody and political a play is funny makes this a worthy addition to the Oddsocks canon, and is a tribute to their irreverent style.

The BNP - the Bogeymen of politics?

Everyone loves a scapegoat. I love scapegoats. We all love scapegoats...or at least, love to hate them. Originally, a scapegoat was a goat chosen from among the Israelite herd (way back in the days of Exodus), that was then symbolically laden with the sins of the people and cast out into the wilderness...naturally taking all the sin and blame away with it, the poor creature.
It's good to have someone take the blame; it's good to channel anger and have some tangible focus for blame. That avoids vague, directionless hatred, and lets us all know who to aim our quietly muttered declarations of vengeance at. Basically, when things go badly, we like to know exactly whose neck (metaphorically) we should grab and throttle.

Right now, we ('we' being the ignorant masses of the British public) like bankers to be scapegoats. The recession (etc.) is all their fault, and so we'd like them to suffer for it, please. Being as they're the only ones qualified, it would be great if they could also sort out the whole sorry mess while they're at it ('it' being swinging from the metaphorical nooses we've strung up for them), please...pretty please?
When teenagers are rowdy, we like their parents or teachers to be scapegoats, though they (the parents and teachers) have a nasty habit of blaming society. Which is clearly wrong, because that's us, and we haven't done anything wrong.
Sometimes, we like foreign immigrants to be the scapegoats. They've come over and taken our jobs, they work for longer, for less pay! The call centres have all shipped out to India! The car factories are heading for the cheap labour force of Eastern Europe – meanwhile, the Eastern Europeans (mainly Poles) take over our building sites and plumbing business. This is their fault for having a strong work ethic and large families to feed, not our fault for being lazy and taking for granted that we in the West have relatively easy lives – having never lost major wars or suffered massive natural disaster or a dictatorial tyranny. In fact, Britain has been able to take it relatively easy since the early 1800s, really, what with an Empire, a worldwide language and an ally in the new World Policeman, America.

Some people who believe that the foreign immigrants changing Britain should leave are the British National Party. They want Britain to stay the way it is...or was, in the bygone, glory days of 1948. Remember those? The post-War debt, loss of international prestige and loss of a generation of brave men and women willing to sacrifice their lives in the defence of democracy? No, me neither, but leader Nick Griffin (born 1959) seems to think he does. Funny, as he's looking very good for a man old enough to remember that year. Apparently, there was a conscious decision by the 'liberal elites' (I think he means the Labour party) to change British society and include people who were civically, but not ethnically, British. There was me thinking the Caribbean and African influx was due to our astounding lack of workforce after a devastating World War, and the desire of men from such places to earn some money for their large, hungry families living in countries soon to take the first steps of their own toward democracy. No, it was because the liberal elite didn't like Britain as it was (the Britain that had elected them into power, rather than re-elect Churchill's Tories, why wouldn't Labour like that?).

Thing is, the BNP have built themselves a bit of a reputation as fascists, as racist bigots who approve of violence and murder to rid Britain of its ethnic minorities. That simply isn't a true reflection of them. They aren't the political bogeymen we (remember who 'we' are in this case) want them to be.

Recently, they've gained seats in the European Parliament, which is a worry for the people I'm tempted to call liberals. I don't really mean liberals, of course; I mean moderates. By which I mean the people in power (well, the Tories, Lib Dems and Labour, anyway). The political elite, if you like. The people that are adamant we, the voting public, have to unite and defeat the BNP, bar them from office etc. Even if we don't vote Labour, Labour want us to make sure we vote against the BNP. It's as though the BNP were some kind of anarchist threat to ordered society. But are they? It's funny – in a worried, laughing-in-the-face-of-probable-danger way – that when Peter Hain wrote to encourage people to vote against the BNP, even if not for Labour, someone replied saying:

'Labour are in the process of passing a law that will allow discrimination on
the basis of race and sex, have invaded two countries, encouraged a politicised
and violent police force, systematically eroded the right and ability to
protest, and given thousands of civil servants the power to spy on citizens.'

When you look at history like that, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell who the moderates are, and who are the radicals that we should absolutely oppose.

I used to think the danger was in taking the BNP seriously, that giving them air time – even attention – was exactly what they wanted and so, like a troublesome child, exactly the thing to not give them. Then they got elected to the European Parliament. Suddenly, they're a bit more serious.
What's worse is people's response to them. When delivering a press conference speech after winning a seat as an MEP, Griffin was hustled by protesters, who pelted him with eggs and forced him to move on. The man was speaking calmly but triumphantly to a crowd of journalists, who were asking him questions that he was answering – as a politician answerable to the people and the press should do – but was attacked violently, and made to leave by his minders. He got into a car, avoiding the angry mob, and quietly drove away while they kicked his retreating car and yelled what sounded like 'Fascist scum off our streets'. So, an elected politician not allowed to express his views, nor answer press questions, by a loud mob...who are the violent bigots here, again?
Even more worrying than that is an interview Griffin recently had on BBC One's The Andrew Marr Show (transcript here), in which Marr somehow manages to make the man sound reasonable. Griffin doesn't sound like a racist, and actually makes a good point about the way that we define who we class as British (when he says that while Dame Kelly Holmes may not be ethnically English she is still British).

What worries me most about this interview though, comes a little later. Now, normally, when people draw comparisons between the Nazis and someone more recent, I groan a little inside. That's because such comparisons usually involve a misunderstanding of either a) the Nazis, b) the people being compared to them, or c) both. So I hesitate to compare the BNP to the Nazi Party, and modern, recession-hit Britain to Germany of the 1930s. Cash-strapped 1930s Germany which was rapidly losing confidence in its ruling political elites, and was looking for a scapegoat...
Hitler's party provided them with several – most famously the Jews, but also the liberal politicians, the Communists, the anti-social (tramps and the work-shy (chavs?)), the homosexuals, the gypsies, the British, the Treaty of Versailles and so on. The Nazis promised to a frustrated people that they would solve all of these scapegoat issues and make the people and nation great again. But before that, they'd been laughed at as a minor rabble of extremists on the fringe of politics, people who should be ignored in the hope that they would go away, deprived of attention like troublesome children. Then they were elected to the Reichstag.

In the twenties, the Nazis had tried to seize power by force, and had failed, Afterwards, they changed their focus and aimed for power legally (which they eventually achieved). In order to appeal to more voters, they tapped into what people wanted to hear, and toned down their extremism. They started sounding reasonable. Their earlier ideas were phased out or put on the backburner for a decade or more. By 1933, they were a very credible alternative to the governing elite, and were even deserving of power according to their electoral success. They'd become moderate, credible, legally elected politicians.

Much of the Griffin-Marr interview indicates that the BNP too have toned their ideas down. Griffin claims that an all-white Britain isn't 'do-able', and the BNP's failure to support England's football side when black players take to the pitch is an attitude of eight years ago. It sounds like they've decided to appeal to voters by becoming reasonable. The media and the political Left have made him the victim of a smear campaign, claiming his dogs are called Ann and Frank, for example. When physically attacked, Griffin didn't use his bodyguards to retaliate. He went quickly and quietly to his car, and retreated, leaving the mob to look like the violent, bigoted ones. Suddenly, with the election of two members as MEPs, the BNP have moderate, credible, legally elected politicians.

The Biblical Israelites used their scapegoats as a means of removing their own sin; the goat took their problems away with it. Germans of the 1930s hoped the Nazis could do something similar – ie. remove their problems for them. In both cases, it was the failings and weaknesses of the people themselves that needed to be removed, be that Israelite sin or a German incredulity that they could have lost the Great War fairly without being stabbed in the back by the liberal politicians, Jews, Marxists etc. Scapegoats are only used when a society is itself flawed, when the people aren't willing to admit that the problem lies with them. This leaves us with the question: what problems are we in modern Britain avoiding, and using for a scapegoat the BNP?

I'm not praising the BNP, nor Labour, nor any other political group or movement. We all like a scapegoat, but the BNP simply aren't the political bogeymen we want them to be.

The Winter's Tale at the RSC Courtyard: in 150 words

It's the play with that immortal – and tricky – stage direction 'Exit pursued by bear', and on seeing the RSC do Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, I have to wonder if he just wanted it to be difficult to stage. Maybe he hoped it would be left alone, slightly like Artaud's The Spurt of Blood, which is famously difficult to perform. Shakey's given this an unbalanced plot, with a sudden geographical and chronological jump, and hasty decision-making from characters who should know better. Then there's that audacious final twist (and the bear feels like a last-ditch effort at making it all impossible to stage). But, somehow, the RSC make it work. Their evident confidence in their own abilities is justified, and the tone they strike is absolutely right. They hold the half-formed threads of this thing together carefully, but wonderfully. And that bear is a triumph of puppetry.

Everything Must Go at the Soho Theatre

It's taken the Soho Theatre about two weeks to knock this together – this, their rapid response to the current recession and its impact on everyday lives.

To be honest, it doesn't feel all that rapid. After all, the recession has been going for a lot more than two weeks, but then, as one character here says: it must be difficult to talk about a thing during a thing. So, perhaps by biding its time, the Soho Theatre has gained some perspective on the recession that has been running for long enough to become (the much-bandied about) the current economic climate.

Soho Theatre has responded with a series of short, new pieces of writing on the theme of economic hardship, which echo the expected themes of inevitable poverty, greed and global fear, as well as less expected ones, like generations-old exploitation and latent racism in the face of immigrant workers. Having only had two weeks, some of them feel a tad under-rehearsed, and a lot of the writing can be tightened, but these are all very good examples of budget theatre done on a small scale ('basement theatre' as the publicity calls it). They're almost scratch performances, and I can't help seeing a possible recession-busting option for theatre being displayed here. On the downside for the Soho, only the front two rows of their (freezing cold) auditorium were on sale, so they won't quite be raking it in.

With eleven pieces to perform, naturally some will be stronger than others. Megan Barker's Anaphylactic is a dark, Roald Dahl-esque tales of bees, terror, sex and freedom, and while the recession's influence is hardly at the forefront, it is crucial in starting the devious plot. Lara Pulver is gripping, sensuous and desperate in what is almost a one-woman show.

But Everything Must Go is better in the second half, with its hit-and-miss nature finding a hit with the homespun kitsch of Marisa Carnesky's House of Knives, a stagily cute fairytale with knife-based magic tricks and table dancing. The first half has a bit of a miss in Maxwell Golden's title piece – Everything Must Go – an underpowered performance of a quasi-rap that Golden hasn't put his heart into...a shame, as the lyrics have great potential, and previous performances of his have been much more energetic and highly-charged.

There's even a pair of songs written by Steve Thompson, about greedy bankers chucking about money they know can't be repaid. It's fun, as well as a brilliant evocation of the fear building in the world. But it goes for an obvious target (bankers, grr) and Anything You Can Do (by Bole Agbaje) has a quick dig at MPs' expenses...easy. What's more difficult and challenging is Will Eno's closing piece, The Train is Leaving the Station, which undermines typical it-was-the-bankers'-fault arguments, blaming the recession instead on people being people.

Eno offers no solutions, nor do any of these plays, but they – and Eno especially – humanise the causes, and make them easier to understand.

Other theatre-based responses to the recession are covered by Lyn Gardner here.

Personal Affairs on BBC Three (Episodes 1 & 2)

This is a man's world. “It's like the sexual revolution happened to someone else”, as Archie Panjabi's aggressively progressive senior partner tells timid temp Sid (wide-eyed Ruth Negga) when she arrives at the bank in which Personal Affairs is based.

Sid has managed to get herself installed as a temp amongst the PAs at City business Hartmann Payne, as part of a cunning revenge plan formulated by her boyfriend (Al Weaver – disguised, for some reason, as an Orthodox Jew). Apparently, his mother blames senior VP Rock Van Gelder (Robert Gant) for her massive losses in the risky world of high-risk finance. The disappearance in Episode One of Rock's PA, Grace (Olivia Grant), throws the other girls into a tizzy as they try to balance their Private Investigator-style activity with demanding roles as PAs in a busy, successful business. Then there's the private life of each to consider! Lucy (Laura Aikman) has become pregnant and is looking for promotion when a junior associate post becomes open. Midge (Annabel Scholey) has given up her daughter for adoption eight years back and has now started to question that decision when the father – supposedly a suicide case eight years ago – crops up as the apparent reason for Grace's disappearance. Nicole (Maimie McCoy) is perhaps the most stable of the lot, rejecting all men as control-seeking bastards whom she won't allow to rule her. Instead, she has casual sex with them, and forgets about them, while being very arch and superior about everything.

And that may be the crucial thing about Personal Affairs. Sex. Or possibly gender and sex. All the PAs seem to be defined by their sexual relations (be it pregnancies or Midge 'accidentally shagging' men she doesn't like). The office has a clear gender divide: the men are in charge, the women treated as lackeys. The proverbial glass ceiling is mentioned frequently. Female partner Archie Panjabi is more macho than your average bloke, and the PAs are beneath her notice. She's disappointed/angered by their inability to follow her lead and act like men in the male workplace, and disgusted by the outfits they wear to appeal to the masculine eyes that rove about so much in that workplace.

As she says, the idea of a sexual revolution seems not to have arrived at Hartmann Payne. Now, I've always struggled to see any reason why women wouldn't be treated on an equal footing with men – indeed, taken it for granted that this is as it ought to be. So the offices of Hartmann Payne seem horribly archaic, backward. It feels like the fifties when Gant's languid Texan compares his PA to the wicket fence around his ranch – he likes his fence to be pretty, so tells her she should dress appealingly. In fact, it's all rather like fifties-based Mad Men (which felt like What Women Want without Mel Gibson and the mind-reading), but British and interesting.

What none of these men seem to realise is how much they rely on their PAs – Sid is right to alter Rock's analogy by describing herself as the ranch's foundations, not the fence; he rattles her, his ranch will collapse. In a way, I can almost understand the sneering prejudice...almost. To follow (what I shall call) the Wimbledon Argument, women are paid less than men because – essentially – they do less. Their Wimbledon prize cheques are smaller because they play three sets, not five. However, to counter the Wimbledon Argument, they've still won Wimbledon, just like the men. The PAs do just as much work as their bosses (even their boss's job, in Lucy's case), but their work is much less public. They seem to exist as a pretty face and body when needed, a typist when required, silent and out of the way when not. But there's no way any of the bosses could cope without them.

Some of the man-bashing is perhaps a bit unnecessary, but the point holds that, here at least, women are under-appreciated. A bit like Boy Meets Girl, the gender of the writer is obvious in the gender portrayal onscreen. The decent men that we just know are out there somewhere are conspicuous by their absence in Personal Affairs. Even friendly, co-conspirator Simon (Darren Boyd) is quietly determined to 'help' Sid out of what he describes as an obsession with maintaining her virginity, and therefore her childishness.

This is a man's world, but it wouldn't be nothing without a woman on the Earth.