The Rocky Horror Show started its life in the Royal Court’s upstairs studio, but this famous example notwithstanding, it’s not a venue one usually associates with whimsy. My pithier summations of Upstairs shows have more often consisted of the phrase “It’s grim in [add appropriate location]”. Will Adamsdale’s piece, a co-production with Bristol Old Vic, is therefore most uncharacteristic. In some respects it is a parody of what was feared when the Court’s previous artistic director Dominic Cooke announced a refocusing of the theatre’s work on the middle classes.
    
Adamsdale’s protagonist is Guy, for “lazy, middle-class writer guy” (although he does so little work that either his partner’s humorously undefined job is very well paid or they have more than the “bit of private money” they admit to). His inert routine is interrupted when the knock-through work on his flat “in an increasingly gentrified part of London” (in effect, Shoreditch) unearths its original 19th-century inhabitant… not his corpse, just a Victorian gentleman who takes up residence with Guy, begins swapping biographical stories and watching his DVDs of The Wire. This odd couple are subsequently joined by Guy’s Nigerian “son” from a charity pseudo-adoption scheme. Events are played out on a large floor-plan of the flat itself, with a backdrop of storage boxes and a couple of Foley tables at either side of the stage. Matters, of course, move inexorably towards a dénouement of both calamity (constructional) and inspiration (motivational).
    
Adamsdale and his four comrades – Melanie Wilson, Jason Barnett, Matthew Steer and Chris Branch (who also provides a sound design and music for the several rambling, hypermetrical songs) – are all terribly amusing, and the 90-minute piece is easygoing in precisely the middle-class way the writer/co-director/lead actor claims to be satirising. I can’t ignore that I, too, am probably being equally and oppositely stereotypical when I complain that this is all simply too trivial for the Royal Court. Nevertheless, it is a feeling which I couldn’t shake. At a time of unprecedented funding cuts which, despite the protestations of arts minister Ed Vaizey, are demonstrably having a significantly damaging effect on outfits all over the country, this is a performance slot which could have been occupied by someone actually saying something, anything, other than a genteelly goofy “hur-hur”.

Written for the Financial Times.