Progress – The Union Theatre, London

Writer: Doug Lucie

Director: Stephen Glover

Reviewer: Honour Bayes

The Public Reviews Rating:

A fearlessly sharp look at the battle of both the sexes and morality within a bourgeoisie middle-class semi-detached environment, Doug Lucie’s caustically funny Progress is nothing if not cutting. With withering precision Lucie sets up and knocks down each of his boorish characters until they are all pretty much as horrible as each other. Only Ronee, who in a moment of defiance finds her salvation in the arms of a woman and the potty mouthed and foul brained ‘hack’ Mark avoid this degrading process. Perhaps this is because both are completely true to themselves; hypocrisy seems to be the worst of all sins.

Will and Ronee are two self righteous do-gooder types who live with ‘resident damp patch’ Mark. Will’s manipulative sexual experiments to keep their marriage alive have seriously backfired and so he rather limply busies himself with a male self help group whilst Ronee has a passionate fling with a lesbian and plays Good Samaritan by inviting a beaten wife into their clearly unhappy marital home. Mark crashes about being generally obnoxious and slowly the parallels between himself and Will are drawn; all men, it would seem, are the same deep down.

Stephen Glover’s production often seems stiff and does little to add any humanity to the bold and blatant character types that Lucie draws so contemptuously; indeed at times this play feels slightly like a rotting wound it’s lines are so viciously drawn. Its saving grace comes in Lucie’s undoubtedly witty satirical jibes that make a mockery of the woolly liberal values; Lucie has no time for these people who ‘stood up’ to Thatcherite conservatism whilst riddled with their own hypocritical prejudices.

The cast also rise to the challenge at points with Victoria Strachan’s impassioned ending as Ronee hitting just the right note of tragic desperation and impressive comic relief from the deft characterisations of Shaun Stone as the stoic Bruce and Gordon Ridout’s hyper-active Oliver. For consistency though only Amy Dawson and Martin Blakelock come through, producing complex and varied performances as the young husband and wife locked in a circle of violence. Dawson fully embodies the broken body of Ange with a visceral voracity that shocks and Blakelock’s empathic performance of Lenny, a wife beating rapist, engenders real sympathy; whether Lucie intended this or not, it is a hard quality to capture and Blakelock does it brilliantly.

Progress is a sharp take on the hypocrisies of middle England but at its heart it is seems to be a play about the basic primal nature of men. It is a nature that Lucie clearly thinks is selfish and violent and for all of his sharp flashes of caustic verbal humour it is a bleak view. With more light and shade this could have been a complex and ultimately compelling production but Glover’s dry direction does little to raise Progress from its simplistic ‘clever clever’ attacks and somewhat depressing depths