Tehran, the sort you’ve probably gawped at on Instagram. Their story starts with a car crash; the audience is
instructed to follow an account on Instagram, to scroll back through their lives with the performers – itself a
kind of digital dig, an addictive archaeological backward spin.
There’s a discursive, essay-like structure to Rich Kids: Alipoor and Sadeghian look at everything from how
the excesses of these young people bring shame on their revolutionary parents, to how Iranian oil-fuelled
colonisation and global expansion by the west. And they also take the really, really long view – looking at
the collapse of ancient civilizations, how long the stuff we consume today will last in the ground (a mobile
phone: about five million years), and how completely mind-bending it is for us to consider time on such a
scale.
There’s a dazzling amount going on – too much, arguably, although that in itself serves to re-enforce points
about our present state of digital overload and conspicuous consumption. The problem is that the
performers don’t always feel completely in control of this: segments where Sadeghian broadcasts live
Instagram stories create an intentionally chaotic chatter as everyone watches at slightly different times –
but you also genuinely can’t follow what she’s saying. The wifi is dodgy, and too much time and energy feels
expended on tech which ought to be serving the story, not obscuring it.
Crocodile Fever also throws a lot at its audience – and while for much of the show, Meghan Tyler’s
heightened, pitch-black comedy is impressively taut, its ending (which I won’t spoil) feels like its runs away
from her somewhat. Still, I loved its whip-crack script and the audaciousness of the frankly bananas finale.
Is all this real? Or just an extended metaphor, for the women’s squashed down frustration and misery at
their small, unfulfilled lives?
We’re in south Armagh in 1989. Alannah and Fianna are sisters, who haven’t seen each other for 11 years;
Fianna has been in prison, and then joined the IRA. Alannah is still in the family home, looking after their
paralysed father. There’s a shrine to their dead mother on the wall – a doll’s house-pink wall, next to a doll’s
house-pink kitchen than Alannah cleans obsessively.
Fianna bursts back in through the window, and soon they’re on the gin and the rum, wrestling with long-
held resentments, guilt, and a shared desire to wreak bloody vengeance on their father, for crimes that will
slowly be revealed. Fianna tells Alannah how the Asmat tribe kill and eat crocodiles that they believe to be
the reincarnation of evil people – symbolic guidance for their revenge that will inflate itself monstrously in
Tyler’s vivid imagination.
Line-by-line her writing is wickedly funny, while its gleefully gruesome look at Troubles-era Ireland
inevitably recalls Martin McDonagh. And it’s motored by two great performances: Lucianne McEvoy is
frantic and twitchy as the uptight, rigid Alannah, while Lisa Dwyer Hogg has a sweary swagger as the
volatile Fianna. Snapping stuff.
Things at first appear to be much more under control in Stef Smith’s Enough. Jane and Toni look at us with
fixed faux smiles; they speak with a shiny smooth gloss. “I am safety.” “I am sex.” “I am here to serve.” They
are flight attendants, neat in blue suits. And they are old friends. Jane is wife and mother, and obsessed with
doing up her house; Toni is single, yearning for a promotion – and for someone just to hold her. Her not-
boyfriend (“just sex”) is only interested in, well, just sex.
The cracks begin to show quickly, in their air hostess polish first of all: there’s wry humour in how they
break out from flight attendant-speak into swearing grumbles about crap hotel rooms, the need to get on the
sauvignon blanc. But the cracks soon spread through everything – their sense of selves and their friendship,