Review: EIGENGRAU, King's Head Theatre, June 5 2016

It's never been easier to connect with people: "Tweet me"; "DM me"; "Just drop me a text". One hears it, and one does it, all the time. Step up from that level of proximity and one finds internet dating, with its algorithms to match one person's interests with another's and promise that this might just be The One. But does all this information actually helps us get to know the real person - indeed, does it help us to get to know ourselves?

Eigengrau (continuing at the King's Head Theatre until 11 July) explores these questions and more in a black comedy set, glory be, in London in 2016!

Mark is doing well in marketing and with the girls he meets in bars, but can't seem to shake off Rose, bubbly, blonde and ever so needy. She's not paying the rent to her flatmate, Cassie, a feminist activist to whom Mark is drawn after a breakfast-time row, and tension is building. Meanwhile Mark's slacker flatmate, Tim, has been seduced by Rose into helping her trap Mark in the hope that the relationship will spark again; and Tim, all doleful longing for love, misreads the signs and thinks Rose is actually interested in him. If that sounds like the preamble to an episode of 1970s spoof comedy "Soap", well, it shows that you don't need 21st century Gumtree and Tinder to throw unlikely people together.

Does it all work? Well, the women (Annie Jackson as exasperated feminist activist with private thoughts that conflict with her public persona and Lotti Maddox as potential bunny-boiler Rose) are fully rounded, if exaggerated, characters who drive the plot. James Sheldon (looking uncannily like cricketer Kevin Pietersen) has not much more than a bundle of amoral tricks to work with as Man About Town Mark - a character who in sitcoms past would be a flirtatious roué possibly played by a young Leslie Phillips or Richard O'Sullivan, but located in the sexual politics of this century, he's more a manipulative villain. Nicholas Stafford does what he can with an underwritten role as Mark's sidekick Tim, fetching beers, feeling depressed but eventually finding a place in the world.

At 90 minutes all-through, the pace seldom slackens - a good thing for comedy - but there's much more we could learn about these four characters who are familiar socially, if not psychologically. If those backstories had been fleshed out further with a little more on how they each got to the pretty pass in which they find themselves, the comedy would have bit harder and the messages about how life in the big city can (paradoxically) alienate us all the more now we're all connected, would have been stronger.

Due to an admin error, the show reviewed above was a preview.

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