BWW Reviews: THE INFANT, Greenwich Theatre, July 1 2011

Greenwich Park is hosting a "London Prepares" event this week, in anticipation of next year's Olympics equestrianism. In the name of "security", even this event has required the issuing of entry passes, parking restrictions and a general inconvenience that a generation ago - when bombs actually were being detonated in English cities - would have seemed like overkill. Such is the security state in which we now live that we barely register the surveillance cameras, the requests for identification and the obstructions to free movement through public space that have become part of post 9/11 life. But what if the security state becomes more personal, more active, more (quite literally) in your face? Just outside this week's security cordon, at Greenwich Theatre, these questions are addressed by Oliver Lansley in The Infant, a black comedy of darkest hue.

Imprisoned by two guards who oscillate between threatening and sympathetic, a man is held captive as a result of a childish drawing that holds the power to overthrow the state. Soon his wife is called in for questioning by the Good Cop (sometimes) and Bad Cop (most of the time) duo. When the infant of the title is suspected of making the picture, the absurdity of the parents' situation sends them spiraling into thinking just how far they would go to save themselves from the consquences of the state's paranoia.

Anthony Spargo and Martyn Dempsey as the guards get most of the laughs with their absurdist banter, but at the play's heart is fracturing family of James Seager and Faye Billing, the everyman couple caught up in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Their family, of course, stands for society today, so quickly enslaved by accusations of existential doom made against suspects themselves little more than infants. But, as the final off-stage words are spoken, we are reminded that paranoia is sometimes, just maybe, the result of some people, even the most unlikely, actually being out to get you after all.

The Infant is at Greenwich Theatre until July 2 and on tour.