Review: LUCE, Southwark Playhouse, March 14 2016

The Jesuits are reputed to have said, "Give me the child for the first seven years, and I'll give you the man." Luce's first seven years were spent in the indescribable horrors of an African war, before he was spirited away to the USA and given a new name and a new home with Amy and Peter. In the ten years since, he has become a star pupil at a progressive high school on his way to a top university on a football scholarship. But who is he really? Indeed, "who" is any teenager today?

Luce (at Southwark Playhouse until 2 April) probes these questions (and a lot more) in a tight 90 minute drama that refuses to hand its audience an easy demarcation between heroes and villains. It's held together by a superb performance by Martins Imhangbe as Luce, the object of so many hopes and fears. Imhangbe's eyes fire with enthusiasm when he feels justified, but they dart with sly acknowledgement of his growing sense of power when he uses his keen intellect and imposing physical presence to manipulate others, unrestrained by a mature sense of empathy. Lots of id: not much superego.

His parents eventually understand that they don't understand the manchild in their midst and take very different approaches to dealing with that uncomfortable knowledge. His mother, Amy (Mel Giedroyc impressing as a fiercely protective mother with plenty of personal investment in a human being she treats as a project) learns more about her son than anyone, but blocks out anything that doesn't fit the image of the shining superman she believes she has fashioned. Luce's father, Peter (Nigel Whitmey), perhaps thinking back to his own uneasy forays out of adolescence and into adulthood, is more sceptical of his son's accounts for his actions. One fears for them.

Natasha Gordon makes the most of an underwritten part as Harriet, Luce's teacher, in her own way as invested as Amy in this "too-good-to-be-true" symbol of the transformative power of love and education. It's also in the scenes in which she appears that the play's biggest fault - an overly glib fitting of events to narrative - comes through most strongly. Would it really have happened like that, I asked myself too often. Conversely, Elizabeth Tan's cameo as Luce's ex-girlfriend, Stephanie, brilliantly reveals just how little one generation knows about the one they purport to be raising, for all the mutual "friendships" on Facebook and sharing of information.

JC Lee's play is emphatically of the present day (a laudable and increasingly rare quality on the London stage) and is unafraid to poke away at its audience's raw sensibilities without ever resorting to crass stereotypes. It's a play in which every person fails, but through the best of intentions and with plenty of compensation, no matter how misconceived their motives may be when considered dispassionately. Failing with rather less in the way of compensation is a language so impoverished by a desire to avoid conflict and offence that it cannot communicate across ethnicities or generations. And skewered alongside the language they use so ineffectively are those parents who think they understand how their teenage children use technology, but just don't.

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