I wish I had not seen this production on its press night, amidst an audience of Royal Court habitués and folk in the trade. With a house full of the people for whom the Theatre Local project is intended, I think – I fear – it may have a very different reception.
    
Previous Theatre Local enterprises staged debbie tucker green’s random about knife crime in the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre and Rachel De-lahay’s The Westbridge about general urban tension in the Bussey Building in Peckham. Now, in the most neighbourhood setting yet, the Rose Lipman Community Centre on the largely high-rise De Beauvoir Estate in Haggerston, north-east London, the choice of flagship production is Annie Baker’s play about an evening drama class in the small fictional town of Shirley, Vermont, hardly a haven for the brothers. Really, did someone just think “Oh, it’s set in a community centre”, as if all such centres were alike? In any case, the configuration of the space is the least site-responsive and most conventional-theatre of any Local site so far: the end-on seating itself comes straight from the Court’s Upstairs space.
    
Don’t get me wrong. James Macdonald’s production is a fine one, with the cast every bit as good as one would expect of Toby Jones, Imelda Staunton, Shannon Tarbet, Danny Webb and Fenella Woolgar. They all expertly pace and pitch our fleeting glimpses of human beings in the cracks between the vapid, artsy-fartsy creative games (nothing as off-putting in these classes as working on an actual play, dear me, no). As often as not a simple look or a mere pause in the final second before a scene-changing blackout shows us what we need to know about this too-smiling teacher (Staunton) and the four students including her husband (Webb). There is moderate poignancy, and rather more humour.
    
But I became more and more aware that the laughter I was hearing was that of familiarity, of people in the professional know chuckling comfortably and a little condescendingly. How would this play to an audience of those on the building’s doorstep? Would the laughter be comradely or derisive as at an entirely different species? Would it be sufficiently, or at all, tempered by the compassionate insights presented as well? I don’t for an instant doubt such an audience’s capacity to understand the play; what I doubt is whether it would offer them anything much to bother understanding.

Written for the Financial Times.