To its credit, 'Utopia' isn't trying to preach. Nonetheless, Steve Marmion's Soho co-production with Newcastle's Live Theatre is crying out for an inspiring artistic vision.
The show bills itself as political theatre, put together with writers as diverse as Simon Stephens, Dylan Moran and Chi Onwurah, the Labour MP for Newcastle Central. Other writers such as Anthony Neilson, who is credited on the website, don't appear in the programme and seem to have fallen by the wayside.
What remains feels like a creaky student revue, opening with six clowns singing vaguely satirical cabaret songs. In the string of sketches that limp after, Moran offers a dismal dinner party, Onwurah presents a kitschy sci-fi reality TV show and Stephens sprinkles blandly smiley epithets. The best is found towards the end, with Alistair McDowall's Pinteresque skit about a war criminal redeemed by Facebook and Janice Okoh's sketch about a world where people selflessly die to make way for babies.
Amusing quotes from Wilde to Beckett are projected overhead and the unifying idea is of expounding and pulping utopian blueprints in a downstage shredder. But the production teeters on Lucy Osborne's wobbly set, with doors that come unhinged and scruffy walls that make it hard to see Jan Urbanowski's projections.
The cast is commendably plucky with the awkward material and TV comedian Rufus Hound brings personality to proceedings. In the end, though, this ungainly collaboration resembles nothing so much as a camel – a horse designed by committee.