B review

The first half hour or so of Sam Pritchard’s stripped-down production is a gently absurdist comedy, vaguely redolent of a much more sympathetic ‘Four Lions’, as the trio of plotters bicker over their aims and their means. ‘B’ stands for bomb but it’s a word they’re all frightened of for various reasons and before long they’ve fallen down a convoluted wormhole of dairy-related euphemisms: the bomb is a cow and the explosives are the cheese (‘you plant a cheese. The cow explodes.’) Oh, and José really wants one of the women to take a dump in the bomb so its payload of nails will be smeared in shit.

It’s kind of fascinating and often funny, but I did wonder where exactly it was going. Calderón wrote it as a response to a strange campaign of late-night, largely non-lethal anarchist bombings that took place in his country. Receiving its world premiere in a barebones production using British actors with British accents, the Chilean context feels remote. With a lack of any other context, the group seem curiously old-fashioned, detached from current Western debates about radicalism and terrorism.

But then it gets bogged down in a series of rambling metaphysical speeches that kind of feel like an over-ambitious attempt to cram it all into an Orwellian framework, topped with a bombastic ending that would seem to completely fly in the face of the real-life context.

I read Doris Lessing’s phenomenal ‘The Good Terrorist’ not so long ago, and it feels like that says everything ‘B’ does, but vastly more successfully. Nonetheless, ‘B’ boasts great performances and an enjoyably mischievous sense of humour – even if it never really goes off with a bang.