REVIEW: MAD at Dream Factory, Warwick, and touring
Steve Sutherland reviews MAD at the Dream Factory, Warwick
YOU have to laugh! In what may yet turn out to be the darkest irony ever, MAD is actually the officially adopted shorthand for Mutual Assured Destruction, a worldwide military strategy wherein the full-scale employment of nuclear weapons by two opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the offender and the retaliator.
The theory is that such a scenario creates a precariously balanced preventative stand-off, preserving a tense but stable global peace. And once both parties are equally armed to the teeth, only a nutter would elect to initiate conflict.
All well and good, of course, except the world is actually run by nutters. It’s an unfortunate state of affairs which has birthed a fine lineage of black satires such as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove and Raymond Briggs’ When The Wind Blows, both blistering critiques of the historic cold war between Russia and the USA.
I say historic because it was vaguely assumed that common sense and moral decency on an international scale had dissipated the shadow of the bomb.
But we’ve suddenly seen a sinister reawakening of the endgame. Hello Assad. Hi Kim Jong. So long Syria. Byesy bye North Korea.
Which, unhappily, is why this play is so pertinent right now. MAD is a smart two hander written, directed by and starring Playbox Theatre alumni Cam Scriven and Daniel Bainbridge, a nervous laugh in the face of disaster.
Scriven is Ian, an idealistic intern at a government building who finds himself accidentally trapped in a room with Bainbridge’s uptight prime minister Robert (“Call me Rob”) who has irreversibly locked himself in to hide from a nuclear strike which is anticipated within the next couple of hours.
He is not there in a bid to survive – there’s never any question that the two will die – he’s there to try and reach a decision about whether to press the button in his briefcase which will, in turn, wipe out his enemy.
What follows is bleakly entertaining stuff. The odd couple debate everything from the nature of heaven, purgatory and hell, what if they become brain-eating zombies, to what animal you’d like to be if reincarnated.
They reminisce, they argue, they fight, they drink whisky, they remonstrate, they examine what they are about to lose and mourn that which they’ll never do, they try to keep their peckers up, they sink into despair, they wonder what it will be like to have your face melt off – pretty much everything you and I would (will?) do under similar circumstances.
Horribly, often hilariously believable, MAD is well observed, very moving and strangely often good fun. Getting a bit meta, there are fantasy sequences, Dennis Potter-like dance numbers and a daft sword fight, while Hank Williams’ I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive provides a suitably sombre soundtrack via subtly updated versions as the show progresses, as if to signify that doomsday isn’t the property of any particular generation. Until it actually happens, of course. Scriven is endearingly passionate as the goofy intern, Bainbridge surprisingly sympathetic as the wavering politician. So, the button? Should he? Shouldn’t he? Will he? Won’t he?
MAD is on its way to London and Edinburgh. Catch it if you can, before it’s too late… for all of us.
