Ruined teeth and oozing skin may not seem ideal qualifications for a dictator class, but in Gary Owen's futuristic drama, only the alarmingly unattractive can rule. An Orwellian shadow hangs over this startling, confident work, which creates a world where beauty, love and charisma are crimes to be eradicated by a political system built entirely on envy.
Owen's The Shadow of a Boy received mixed reviews at the National Theatre earlier this summer. Here, however, director Vicky Featherstone reveals The Drowned World as a linguistically daring, conceptually mesmerising work that makes Shakespeare's green-eyed monster look disconcertingly clawless.
Tara and Julian (Josephine Butler and Theo Fraser Steele) are an irritatingly beautiful couple; the kind born to pose in the windows of trendy bars, while Darren and Kelly (Neil McKinven and Eileen Walsh) are so clammily repellent that you would have problems sitting next to them on a train. All four face the audience from a garishly picturesque set, where lilies in a metallic, glassfronted case form the backdrop, and describe the shifts of power in a system where it is a sin even to enjoy a sunset.
Owen knows that a purely aesthetic polarisation of society would not be enough to make this psychologically engaging. His stroke of genius is to tap into paranoia about nuclear and chemical warfare by classifying attractiveness as "radiance", which - like radiation - can supposedly contaminate all those who come near it. The superb cast brings out every nuance of Owen's hellish, yet strangely comic, vision.
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