Mike Bartlett’s hour-long, four-letter-titled plays are the punchiest strain of his work, and he has begun 2015 with a powerful one-two. He led strongly with Bull at the Young Vic, but Game is a knockout. The combative metaphors fit this group of plays also, although in this particular case the keynote is less “fight” than “hunt”.
    
Carly and Ashley, unable to afford to buy or rent a place of their own, are offered a dream home if they sign up to a business deal which, at first unspecified, soon becomes clear. They are to live in a kind of real-life Big Brother house, into which richer folk pay to enter, lurk behind one-way walls and shoot the couple. It is only with brief-duration tranquilliser darts, but even so, Carly and Ashley are the game of the title, in the senses both of pastime and wildlife. Their initial shock soon gives way to a kind of grudging acceptance of their commodification, but as revenues fall, the company grows more desperate.
    
Sacha Wares’ production has a cast of 12, but we see only three in any detail: Jodie McNee and Mike Noble as the degraded victims, and Kevin Harvey as the conflicted game “warden” who oversees the stream of loathsome visitors: a bickering middle-aged couple, a raucous hen-night party, a venomous teacher and so forth. Wares’ staging makes us complicit in the whole business: we too sit behind the one-way gauze walls of Miriam Buether’s remarkable set, watching both the targets and video feeds of the various “clients”. We listen over headphones. We are deliberately desensitised, to show us what a small step it is from the current demonisation of the poor to this lethal circus. A too-remorseful cop-out ending does almost nothing to lessen the shocking impact of these ideas. And yet I couldn’t look away.
    
As I left the theatre, a group of teenagers behind me were discussing the play animatedly, in particular that there had been a moment (however brief and obscured) of real nudity. I fervently hope this meant they were discounting the subject matter as obviously fictional, not that they found it so plausible as to be already mundane.
    
Written for the Financial Times.