With The Shadow of a Boy, Welsh playwright Gary Owen provided one of the stinkers of the National Theatre's Transformation season. He is in far stronger form in The Drowned World, a paranoid fantasy for the Paines Plough company that nags away in the memory like a bad dream.
In a dystopian future, the plain and the ugly have turned on the beautiful and the radiant. If you are attractive, you are regarded as a non-citizen, rounded up and exterminated, though it is a policy doomed to depopulate the world. The citizens with their "ruined skin and rotten teeth" cannot bear the thought of having sex with each other, and lust only after those they despise, fear and kill.
Owen's satire on body fascism, which reverses the sad, familiar truth that in real life, the beautiful have it far easier than the ugly, is developed with dramatic urgency and ingenuity, though he has an unfortunate tendency to overwrite. Vicky Featherstone's disturbing production is strongly performed, and at last I begin to understand why Owen is so hotly tipped a writer.` |
