BWW Reviews: THE SHALLOW END, Southwark Playhouse, 13 February 2012

"Things can only get better". Back in '97, the soundtrack to Tony Blair's brave new dawn seemed more than just a handy slogan, because lots of things did get better - but the hubris was in that little word "only". As we know all too well now, things could also get worse. While New Labour were hoovering up votes, Doug Lucie was looking at journalism and concluding that, as far as that profession was concerned, things could only get worse, and 15 years later with the Leveson Inquiry lumbering on, journalists arrested on a weekly basis and newspapers shedding staff as quickly as readers, one can only conclude that he was right. 

Lucie poured his disgust into The Shallow End (revived by Stone Junction at Southwark Playhouse until 3 March). In four scenes, journalists on an unnamed Sunday broadsheet recently acquired by a worldwide media empire clash over the culture change being wrought in the name of giving the punters what they want. One by one, the old paper's journalists are purged, replaced by those happy to fit in to a downmarket, sleazy, superficial new paper. There's the old school arts editor (literally as well as metaphorically) kicked in the balls by the sex and power obsessed showbiz scandal queen brought in to "extend the paper's target market". A sports reporter does a little coke with a journalist more interested in gossip than goals and is spared the sack - for now. An ageing political editor accepts the post of sketch writer, a job he last did twenty years ago (about the same time that he last spoke to his wife) before summoning up the courage to resign. And an investigative reporter plays dumb before revealing his claws and shaking the smug certainty of the senior managers revelling in the carnage.

While the absence of mobile phones and any mention of the internet (newspapers' greatest threat back then was cable television) dates the play, the amoral arrogance of a puffed up class of brutal manager / dealmakers forcing out traditional practitioner / craftsmen lies at the heart of the collapse in public confidence endured by banking and journalism (and, in the expenses scandal, politicians too). Lucie nails the hypocrisy of management-speak, the powerlessness of appeals to decency and ethical norms of behaviour and, most of all, the irrelevance of history to ruthless men carrying out the orders of faceless corporate suits.

There's plenty to quibble about in this play - not every villain needed to have an Essex accent, the first half could be cut by fifteen minutes - how much porn talk does one need these days - and I could have read a copy of The Sun in the time it took to effect the scene changes. But the play's strengths far outweigh its weaknesses, not least in its acting. Louise Templeton and Stephen Chance are wonderfully world-weary and funny, while Kristen Mcilquham portrays a grotesque foreshadowing of the "writing career" of Katie Price. I found myself alternately laughing and wincing as the barbs bit - and that's a mark of great satire. Alas, my biggest wince was reserved for getting home and, yes, through force of habit, turning on Sky News. Let he who is without sin etc etc etc.

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