Holes

It’s always arresting when a play gets unintentionally caught up in circumstances. Since this story of four survivors of an inexplicable plane crash premiered in Edinburgh last year, one passenger flight has disintegrated and another vanished entirely. Tom Basden’s play reflects only dimly on these events – in occasional threads of techno-scepticism or post-9/11-paranoia – but still, the timing makes the blacks blacker and the laughs considerably less easy in this frequently hysterical comedy.

Ian, Gus and Maria are three thirty-somethings who were on their way to a dreadful conference on market demographics before their plane tanked on a desert island. They’re joined by Erin, a quiet and vulnerable teenager. On one level we’re in familiar ‘Lord of the Flies’ territory, and the final scenes in particular feel disappointingly pat. But it’s the meat Basden makes of the detritus of modern life that ensures ‘Holes’ is such a chilling hoot.

Basden is particularly accomplished at splitting apart the commonplace to reveal comic absurdity and dangerous untruths. His physical comedy plays the same trick with objects: Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’ is re-appropriated to score a funeral; an iPad is re-purposed as a spade for burying bodies. As the increasingly confident Ian begins to revel in this clean slate of a new world, everyday ignorance and brutality digs deep around the foundations of civilisation until language, sense and civility catastrophically subside.

As Ian, there’s a fantastic performance from Daniel ‘BT Infinity’ Rigby that tips brilliantly from comedy into horror, and Elizabeth Berrington is excellent as the tragically banal Marie. It’s all a lot cleverer than its bantering tone suggests, and a lot funnier than anything that ratchets so gleefully through the lost luggage of our collective dignity has any right to be.