Trip's Cinch / Three More Sleepless Nights
Lion & Unicorn, London

Stuart Simpson

Twice As Loud Theatre Company's double bill presents two short, thoughtful plays by contemporary female writers (Phyllis Nagy and Caryl Churchill). The idea of choosing these two particular plays for a double bill is a good one. To see the common theme, how men and women negotiate their most intimate relationships, dealt with so very differently by the two writers allows a better understanding of what is common to both plays.

Trip's Cinch, the first play of the evening, is not concerned so much with the relationships between the play's three characters as it is concerned with relationships of power and authority in general between the sexes.

The play opens in the aftermath of a high-profile rape trial. A feminist academic, more used to deconstructing gender in romantic poetry, is researching a book about the trial. The accused, a powerful captain of industry, has been found not guilty of raping a lowly lollipop lady: inevitably, we suspect that power has triumphed over justice. The play's three characters, however, throw our assumptions into doubt.

The academic is an idiot. Both the businessman and the lollipop lady can out-think her, and her reaction is one of surprise that anyone thinks at all. And far from being all-powerful, the captain of industry seems barely capable of tying his own shoelaces; he is socially childlike, innocent and weak. Meanwhile, the lollipop lady is hardnosed, manipulative and aggressive.

It is a little difficult to work out how much of the strangeness of the three characters is intentional. All the signs are there for these characters to be what they seem at first; the powerful businessman, the abused innocent victim and the radical feminist. The social ineptitude of the businessman could easily be seen as a reflection of his arrogance and single-minded drive.

It is when he starts to play solitaire that things become odd. The solitaire motif runs throughout the play. At one point he asks the academic 'Do you play?', as if he were asking if she knew of this world of individual solitary strategic contemplation in which he is a grand master. None of the characters seem to be aware that you can teach monkeys to play solitaire.

The lollipop lady seems equally odd. She seems antagonistic and bitter when introduced as she is being interviewed by the academic. This is understandable, of course, given the assumption that she has suffered both a rape and the humiliation of losing a trial and is now talking to someone who hopes to gain money and fame through writing an account of the scandal.

What throws us is her second appearance, in a flashback to the night of the infamous rape. The businessman is behaving in a sincere and friendly manner, and is being subjected to the same bitterness and abuse meted out earlier (later) to the academic. The implication at the end of this scene is that perhaps it is the powerful businessman has been taken advantage of. Perhaps the whole point is that we can never know.

The second show in the double bill is far clearer, and funnier. Three More Sleepless Nights presents us with the pillow talk of three couples. The first takes on the stereotype of lumpen proles: he comes home drunk, she nags. I had the horrible thought at this point that I might be in for an hour of gritty social realism, but what we actually get is a more intelligent version of Harry Enfield's Wayne and Waynetta.

The second couple are the middle class friends of the first pair. This couple are just as ridiculous as their lumpen friends, and just as unhappy in their own way. While she complains of existential angst, 'Am I real?' and talks of suicide, he can only talk about the films he likes. (He is quite insightful, though. Alien is a science-fiction film, but not like Star Trek, as the women wear dungarees and do proper work.) I won't describe the third couple, but it is enough to say that we are shown a world in which men and women have no capacity to relate to each other in anything but the most superficial manner.

After two hours, and two very different takes on the way men and women behave towards each other, it becomes clear that the two plays share one thing, and it isn't that they both examine the same theme, but that both plays portray the most basic of human relationships as deeply problematic. Twice As Loud, in choosing these two contempory plays as complementary works on a common theme, have also stumbled on a useful way of reminding the audience that often the new work we see on stage is more a portrayal of contemporary values and ideas than it is an examination of something timeless and essentially human.

Till 8 February