Private View/Protest

It's not every day you get to deliver the line 'goodbye – and thanks for all the groombles'. This is Mike Sengelow as Vaclav Havel's hero Vanek, bidding farewell after a visit to his frightful friends. He's just been subjected to a 'private view' of Michael and Vera's house, their sex life, and the gourmet 'groombles' (canapés) Vera has prepared for him. Sengelow spends the play with a look of pained bewilderment – think Tim from 'The Office' – furrowed onto his features, and treacly Stuart Fox and Carolyn Backhouse are terrific as the smug couple who, as they protest with mounting desperation, 'have [Vanek's] best interests at heart.' Written in 1975, 'Private View' dramatises the unease spread by dissidents (like Havel) among those who acquiesce in the status quo. So does its companion piece 'Protest', which ruthlessly skewers liberal hypocrisy. Here, Vanek invites his old friend Stanek, a well-heeled TV writer, to sign a protest against the political imprisonment of a Czech pop star. The play anatomises Stanek's evasions with forensic precision. In Sam Walters's very funny production, both plays give the compromised enough rope to hang themselves, while Vanek/Havel sits there, beadily (or self-righteously) looking on. Like the bastard offspring of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, the plays combine lacerating comedy of manners with a still-challenging invitation to take moral responsibility for the choices we make.