Review: Boiling Frogs, Southwark Playhouse

An edited version appeared in Time Out

You can't boil a frog by adding hot water. Gradually increase the heat, however, and it will accept its fate compliantly. Steven Bloomer's lofty play - left-leaning all the way off its high horse - attacks our unwitting complicity in the similar erosion of our civil liberties. Freedom of speech, he suggests, is as fantastical as hobbits and elves.

Bloomer twists the present into an Orwellian police state laced with Dario Fo's absurdity. As carnival placates the locals, the police enjoy a shindig of their own: passing nibbles and popping streamers. Locked in a shrinking cell downstairs, as yet uncharged, are two costumed protestors (Superman and Jesus, who closer resembles Gandhi) and a policeman. Faced with their own prisoner's dilemma, the three turn on one another.

However, Bloomer mistakes a balloon debate for drama, presenting not people but points on a triangle: apathy, idealism and action. His insistence on our culpability, noble though it sounds, grows wearisome. Besides, there's a nagging hypocrisy: if he really cares, why rail in a fringe theatre?

There are deft touches, notably Pochoir's boilersuit costumes stencilled with Banksy-like uniforms, but The Factory's laboratory techniques and multiple casts become redundant: hangovers from their feted improvised classics that, here, needlessly scuff the polish.