I’ve now seen enough of Alistair Beaton’s work to be fairly confident that it’s not just coincidence, a series of bad days or anything of that sort: I simply think he’s overrated as a satirist. Plays such as Feelgood (2001, about Blairism), Follow My Leader (2004, about the politics of Gulf War II) and King Of Hearts (2007, about the royal succession) all have an assured dramatic flow and contain a slew of topical references, but the actual business of each piece – the satiric bite – never draws blood. It is always too blunt, in the sense either of timidity or of crassness or both.

Fracked, about the manipulation of public and political opinion for selfish corporate ends, fits the pattern entirely. It moves easily, in Richard Wilson’s staging, between the offices of an unscrupulous PR company representing a fracking firm and the living room of a cottage in the village about to become its testing ground, as an elderly lady and her even more cautious husband (Anne Reid and James Bolam) are gradually awakened to the value of direct action. Beaton has kept matters up to date by adding a clutch of lines about this being a day-after-tomorrow, post-Brexit Britain... and which chimed with the press-night audience so much that the remark “This is England – we don’t do human rights any more” drew approving applause.

However, the comedy itself is not driven by the blindness of Deerland Energy and the various legal and ecological enormities being committed, but by easy stereotypes: the company’s chief and his old-fashioned manners, the ease with which he is gulled by the oily, foul-mouthed PR flack (Oliver Chris in the kind of role he can play in his sleep), the New Agey activist who hugs, meditates and calls people “dude”, and so on. It’s a timely subject – and Chichester is itself in an area which, depending on future economic trends, could well see the hydraulic-fracturing extraction of shale gas in years to come – but a deceptively antiquated play in its approach and structure. And toothless satire, by creating the image of opposition but never actually posing a threat, ends up reinforcing what it is ostensibly challenging.

Written for the Financial Times.