The Royal Court has had some remarkable strokes of good luck on the topicality front. True, it was a reasonable guess that a general election would be held around the time Laura Wade’s Posh opened last year, with its indictment of  a student body not entirely unlike the Bullingdon Club of which several senior Tories had been members at Oxford. But surely no-one could have foreseen the Jimmy Savile scandal shivering the timbers of every bulwark of British society just as Lucy Kirkwood’s new play (whose title is an abbreviation of “Not Suitable For Work”, a label attached to risqué emails and the like) opened.
    
In fact, Kirkwood’s play concentrates on print media, a sector which has so far (and unconvincingly) resisted being thus shivered. Also, having introduced her crisis – the latest topless pin-up in a lads’ magazine turns out to be under age – she swiftly sidesteps into more general issues. What she is concerned to show is the offensive, damaging and above all wholly un-self-aware culture of objectification and unrealistic aspiration fostered by all sections of the press. She follows the scene of confrontation between the lads’ mag editor and the girl’s father with an encounter set several months later. The naïve junior staffer scapegoated for the pin-up affair is now applying for a minor post at an upmarket women’s title; he discovers that Electra magazine’s ideology of perfection-as-lifestyle-goal is as manipulative and harmful to its “upscale” readers as Doghouse’s “phwoar”-oriented slant is to its “troglodyte” constituency. There is a tacit conspiracy to keep us all unsatisfied with ourselves.
    
The play’s most significant weakness lies with its “right-minded” antagonists. Both the father and the young journo are stereotypical underdog figures, blatantly hooking our identification with them before each in turn capitulates. A more fluid dynamic would be much more interesting… as it is for a few minutes when Doghouse’s editor begins to voice some quite Luciferic arguments about the culture in general, before moving back into conventional demonic territory. Julian Barratt’s absence-of-acting acting style, which irked me earlier, is what “buys” this phase of overt bastardhood. As Electra’s editor, Janie Dee plays perhaps the most unpleasant role I have ever seen her take: not quite the devil in Prada, but a chic succubus to be sure, with a smile emptier than that of Margaret Thatcher as whom her (male) menial is dressed. If Kirkwood had seriously indicted our wider hypocrisy as well as the media’s, this play would have been brilliant. As it is, we can pretend that it’s not really about us as an audience. Isn’t it? Visit the most popular British newspaper website and perform a search on the phrase “all grown up” – you will be horrified. I repeat, the most popular such site.
     
Written for the Financial Times.