Not even Rob Brydon can save this leftie tosh: QUENTIN LETTS reviews Future Conditional

By Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail

Published: 19:56 EST, 10 September 2015 | Updated: 08:55 EST, 11 September 2015

Future Conditional (Old Vic, London)

Verdict: Imperfect 

Rating:

London's Old Vic has a new artistic director after the garlanded departure of Kevin Spacey. His successor Matthew Warchus’s first production opened this week and I fear it is a dud: cliched, dramatically untidy, untruthful to the point of dishonesty.

Future Conditional tries to use comedy and a cast of adults dressed in school uniforms to make sweeping points about the English education system. Playwright Tamsin Oglesby inveighs against academic selection and independent schools. She does so by giving us four scenarios so frequently chopped and changed that narrative flow is lost and the production starts to resemble a TV sketch show.

We are shown: a group of mothers (and one father) outside a London primary school; a comprehensive school teacher (Rob Brydon), who in monologues patiently admonishes unseen pupils; a committee of unspecified equalities bureaucrats who at one point have a food fight; and two Oxbridge dons assessing would-be undergraduates.

Rob Brydon in Future Conditional at London's Old Vic in the new artistic director Matthew Warchus’s first production

One of these dons, in bow tie and sports jacket, is racist and snobbish, clumsily sneering about Asians and trying to select the sporty son of a rich donor rather than a clever, orphaned Pakistani girl. This portrait of Oxbridge clubbishness is so ludicrously unbelievable it would stick out as a crude caricature even in a Christmas pantomime.

Ms Oglesby, herself educated at Oxford, must know her attack on the dons is out of date by more than 20, 40, even 60 years. Why did she do it? Why did the Old Vic stage this rubbish?

The show is staged, less than flawlessly, in the round. It starts with the company trooping on in school clothes and playing a tune on recorders, complete with two rock guitarists in the Circle boxes.

One of these guitarists was a ringer for Yvette Cooper. The other, owing to the duff sightlines, I could not see. Perhaps he looked like Ed Balls.

Snatches of speeches from Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair, Michael Gove and others indicate this is going to be a political evening. So it proves, though on the intellectual level of a local radio phone-in.

The mothers at the school gate, like most characters in the play, are stereotypes.

There is a violent chav, a chubby Indian, a selfless Leftie, a manipulative Rightie and a pragmatic, not-so-rich Sloane (Lucy Briggs-Owen, doing her usual, quite effective thing of quivering hands and wide-popped eyes and double takes and hair tousling). Mr Brydon, who may usually be associated with comic roles on television, delivers a likeable secondary school teacher.

That leaves us with the committee of bureaucrats: one went to Eton, one to Westminster, one is a Scots class warrior, one is fat but good at maths and keeps eating biscuits.

They sit in a circle on plastic chairs and conduct earnest debates about how to reform the education system.

Comrade Oglesby’s solution is that Oxbridge should take the top three pupils from every school in the land, no matter what their qualifications.

We must hope that in future Mr Warchus himself shows a more discerning approach to selection, spurning such simplistic tosh for something more elevated.

Brave new world that's a perfect reflection of modern Britain's ills

Brave New World (Royal and Derngate, Northampton and touring)

Verdict: Powerfully prescient 

Rating:

Scene: A hospital ward where starchy medical orderlies, in their sterile way, are helping patients to die — ‘facilitating their departure’.

One woman’s son rushes in to try to save her. The doctors are outraged at his interference. Anyway, they say, another euthanasia candidate needs the bed.

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931 — 18 years before his former pupil, George Orwell, published the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Brave New World - Gruffudd Glyn and William Postlethwaite

Orwell’s less subtle prediction of gloom for a distant future has become better known than Brave New World, but a new touring stage version of Huxley’s story, which opened in Northampton this week, may help to restore the balance.

It was more than 30 years since I had read Brave New World and I had forgotten quite how brilliantly prescient it was. Huxley imagined a world in which babies could be created in test tubes, where parents were regarded as unnecessary, where hedonism eclipsed love.

In this zombified, zoned-out, plasticated political system, the arts are shunted into a siding by an elite that does not want the great unwashed to get ideas above its station.

It’s modern Britain!

That is the brilliant success of this production: it hammers home how much Huxley got right.

Director James Dacre does his best to create a futuristic setting despite Northampton’s old-fashioned proscenium arch.

Techno-style music and television monitors just about avoid taking us into Blake’s Seven territory.

Dawn King’s adaptation plays down the novel’s references to ‘Fordism’ (Huxley was satirising big industry, such as the Ford motor company) and accentuates, rather well, the sexual slinkiness of a society where citizens are encouraged to bed numerous partners.

Olivia Morgan is excellent as young, slender Lenina, a ‘Beta’ class operative who casts her eye at ‘Alpha’ males.

Sophie Ward is good as the World Controller (here a woman, though a man in the book).

And as an untamed outsider, William Postlethwaite (son of the late Pete) very much looks a star of the future. Intelligent, watchable, timely fare.