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Review

Muswell Hill

4 out of 5 stars
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Time Out says

The pre-show instruction to switch off your mobile phone is also the take-home moral of Torben Betts's comedy of (bad) manners, in which bleeps and tweets ruin a middle-class dinner party on the night of the 2010 Haitian earthquake.

Everyone in married couple Mat and Jess's plush kitchen has their head buried in a handheld device. However, Betts digs beneath the ironic trope regarding our inability to communicate in the communications age, offering an astute and multifaceted diagnosis of a very modern malaise.

Every aspect of his characters' lives is infected by the internet. They're disconnected from reality, incapable of interaction and trapped beneath inflated aspirations. None of them accept, let alone tolerate, their own ordinariness. They are the stretched middle, torn by envious resentment of the A-list and liberal guilt for the Third World.

Darkly funny (Mike Leigh writ large), 'Muswell Hill' thrives by transplanting online behaviour into real life. Characters speak in self-absorbed status updates, proffer irrelevant Wikipedia morsels and troll one another with acidic pedantry.

Sam Walters's boisterous production is richly performed, with Jasmine Hyde fantastic as the hostess holding it all together, and colourful turns from her oddball guests, most notably Dan Starkey – hilarious as the narked and lonely pipsqueak Simon.

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Mon-Sat 7.45pm; Thur Mat 2.30pm; Sat Mat 3pm
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