Theatre

When The Presnyakov Brothers’ ‘Terrorism’ played the Royal Court in 2003, it was hailed as a powerful and satirical portrait of Putin’s Russia as a country riddled with violence to an almost surreal degree. Those who see this revival by Kadmes Theatre might wonder what all the fuss was about.

The play starts in an airport closed by a bomb scare, and then runs through a half-dozen seemingly unrelated scenes that explore the frustrations and minor alarms of modern life. A couple play out bondage games on a bed. Policewomen discuss the aesthetic qualities of photos of blown-up bodies. It all does eventually piece together to make up a single jigsaw puzzle, but it’s not really an edifying picture to look at once it’s finished. It’s in the parts that the play’s power lies, if anywhere.

What the Brothers seem to be after is both the dread that underlies our banal day-to-day worries and, taking a step back, the blackly comic delights of laughing at that dread. In Martin Berry’s production neither the comedy nor the dread is forthcoming, not even in the key scene in which a pair of old women nattering on a park bench suddenly have the red dot of a sniper’s laser sight shone onto their foreheads. Performances lapse into caricature, dodgy accents abound and loud rock music plays during the scene changes, as if to keep things energised. It’s not enough.