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The New Diorama's first in-house show is a 'Mean Girls'-inspired total theatre riff on Brecht's 'The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui', which allegorised Hitler's Germany as gangland Chicago. Here, writer/director David Byrne's Machiavellian climb takes place in a modern secondary, where the racket is Quavers and Chewits, the enticements UCAS points and Facebook friends and the house party a weapon to rival any putsch.
New girl Ruth is the pitiless plotter, played by Madeleine MacMahon with an instinctive hunger for power that verges on the sensual. Her eyes dart as she feels about for the weak spots in clique queen Jessica or student rag editor Ethel (two sharp comic turns from Hannah Duncan and Leah Milner).
They're all playing the game of life, and Byrne frames the whole thing as a video game, with projected text alerts when Ruth moves 'up a level' or shifts into 'two-player mode'. Sliding blackboards convey the commotion and claustrophobia.
It's fresh, frenetic, and very funny, but does rather contradict its stated message that evil takes root when good people turn blind eyes. As Ruth herself reflects in the epilogue, 'we were always the people we were going to turn into.'