Fear review, Bush

Fear at the Bush Theatre is about the urban underbelly, the  muggers and the petty criminals who value us as commodities. An Omega watch, Prada shoes, gold cufflinks and an Agnes B suit set you around the £10k mark. The size of the briefcase indicates an iPad and superior phone. Watch out Mr Banker, a shaven headed mini-me, taken straight from Dicken's London, is right behind you...

Fear from the madding crowd

Dominic Savage's play looks at greed and how it drives both the mugger and the banker. When the luscious straight-backed Gerald in white shirt and precision haircut meets the simian Kieran, head and body hung low in an all encompassing hoodie, we know there's no happy ending. To bang home the point, Savage devotes an hour to criminality and its drivers with Kieran and his sidekick, Jase, providing an Antiques Roadshow-type master class in human worth. The tension created through mood and movement is constantly deflated by rhetoric. The extended discussion during Gerald's mugging is like being at a dysfunctional encounters group.

Aymen Hamdouchi is brilliantly terrifying and pathetic as Kieran, a boy whose hidden talents were corrupted before they erupted. Rupert Evans as Gerald is beautiful, repellent and ultimately moving. The two females lack soul or meaning. The set is like a loft conversion - one wall of elegantly exposed brick behind glass partitions and, in the foreground, a high single bed dressed in white linen and a slim dining table with faux Starck dining chairs. The transition to mean streets is unconvincing. That said, my younger companion loved it all.

In conclusion: To compare the greed of corporate mugging with head-butting and murder is like comparing curry with chips. They're both cooked foods, but that's where the similarity ends. It's a disparity that Fear fails to square.

References
Bush Theatre, tickets
Dominic Cavendish review in The Daily Telegraph