Last autumn Southwark Playhouse staged an adaptation of the 1980 glam-disco movie Xanadu on rollerskates. Since Gregory S. Moss’s punkplay [sic] is another skate piece set around the same time, someone thought it appropriate to use “Xanadu”’s title song as pre-show music. On endless loop, and I mean endless: not just repeated, but uninterrupted. This is how they broke Noriega.

The skates here are partly a matter of unorthodoxy for the sake of it, partly challenge, partly satire and partly crass coming-of-age metaphor: at the end of the play, when Mickey, the dorkier of the two protagonists, moves on from the prescriptive, doctrinaire form of punk espoused by his friend Duck, he removes his skates and literally finds his feet.

This tangle is the play’s problem in miniature. Both Moss and director Tom Hughes proclaim in programme notes their loyalty to the punk ethic of defiant individualism and originality. However, the play is set at a time during the Reagan era when even second-wave American punk such as Black Flag and Minutemen – bands lauded by Mickey and Duck in a play consisting of short scenes inspired by various punk songs, and involving several live performances of tuneless thrash numbers – had expired. By that stage it was always mere totem rather than rebellion. Moss knows this, and portrays it in the central duo’s approach. This, however, immediately strips them of any sympathy or respect; the author’s attitude towards his characters may be intended to be punk in the sense of nihilist identification, but what it actually shows is sterile contempt.

With nothing to care about, the play becomes simply a matter of entertainment and/or analysis. Yes, there are appealing moments such as a cough-mixture-fuelled fantasy about sex with a Reagan-faced cheerleader while Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ looks on; yes, Hughes makes the occasional sharp allusion, such as to Alex Cox’s Repo Man by using generic blank labels on products: records come in white sleeves with “RECORD” written on them in ballpoint. But there is a gaping hole at the centre of things, and it is not the chasm of the “Morning in America” era’s solipsism. The biggest issue addressed here is how to play a bass drum pedal in a rollerskate.

Written for the Financial Times.