The Shallow End - The Royal Court Theatre
Journalists. Lovely people in everyone’s eyes. Yeah, right. Let’s face it, journalism can be a crooked business. It has to be that way. Everyone’s fighting to get their grubby little fingers on the latest exclusive.
This is the story told in "The Shallow End". A newspaper is losing its readers rapidly and so the editor decides that it’s time for serious change. In order to do this, he has to bring in new talent and lay off all the old has-beens. The play is split into four acts, actually bloody long scenes rather than acts, with each looking at different new or old contributors to the paper.
The first act sees the introduction of Slater, the proposed editor of a new lifestyle column - sort of a nightmarish genetic combination of Claire Rayner and Miss Whiplash. At first it’s difficult to tell whether she’s meant to be a serious writer or a hooker picked up by the editor - her description of mental undressing is explicit to say the least.
Prepare to be a little shocked by the second act. A couple are seen screwing on a pool table all the way through, only stopping for the man to light a fag. The main action centres around an ageing sports correspondent telling his younger, sensationalist counterpart how it’s not like it used to be, but you keep getting, well, distracted.
A familiar face appears in act three. Jane Asher proves that she can do one hell of a lot more than give you outstanding biscuit recipes: she’s a damn good actress. This episode has her spilling her guts about her loveless marriage to an unfaithful political correspondent.
The final act is undoubtedly the best. Rees, the foreign correspondent returns from six years abroad to find out he’s been fired. The way that he acts in such an off-hand manner to everything said to him works very well and got the crowd laughing on a number of occasions.
Overall, there’s not much of a plot. It’s more episodic, with each act consisting of a series of lengthy dialogues. In all but the final act, it degenerates into a perv-fest at some point, unless I’m very much mistaken and Jane Asher was, in fact, talking about a new type of digestive biscuit when she mentioned "giving him a blow-job in the front seat of his BMW". But despite that, it’s quite good. Quite funny and very thought provoking.
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