Progress
Union Theatre, London
Sexual politics has always been fertile (oops) ground for comedy and Doug Lucie’s vigorous 1984 satire, Progress, is now revived on the London fringe. For us older lefties, it’s a bit of a nostalgic trip into the past. We are in Kilburn during the Margaret Thatcher era and the local right-on Labour Party members have turned inward. As 30-something Will and his wife Ronee decide to experiment with radical sexual politics, the men’s group that he hosts explores, often hilariously, the subject of sexism and what it might mean to be a “new” man.
In this context, it’s the women who are the radical ones. Ronee takes things further and finds it more comfortable – and more pleasurable – to spend time in the arms of a female lover than to endure her husband’s ideas of liberation, which inevitably involve kinky threesomes and what would nowadays be termed girl-on-girl action. For their
friends as well, sexual freedom boils down to selfishness: where sex is concerned, individual lust trumps collective correctness every time.
These liberal folk, who are working for Channel 4, a local community arts centre and a crafts stall, include the talkative Oliver, his bisexual live-in lover Martin, barman Bruce, plus Will and Ronee’s lodger, Mark, a Daily Express journalist. In the first half of the play, their men’s group session offers a delicious parody of early 1980s radical politics, with earnest discussions of porn and excruciating male breast-beating.
As so often in his work, Lucie is concerned as much with class as with sex. So when
20-something Angie, a working-class woman, gets beaten up by her brutish husband Lenny, she takes refuge with Will and Ronee. But Lenny knows where she’s gone, and when he turns up and contemptuously pours tea on Will and Ronee’s shagpile, you just know that things will get worse. They do – and one of the lessons of the play is that even radical middle-class lefties end up exploiting the workers.
Left-wing hypocrisy is often an easy, perhaps too easy target, but there’s an attractive acerbity in Lucie’s tone and a merciless clear-sightedness in his portrayal of human weaknesses. Written with a fierce wit, Progress is ironic in its title and pretty scathing in its account of how the middle classes simply can’t be trusted with progressive ideas. As the stammering Bruce exclaims: “Politics is a joke.”
In retrospect, although Lucie doesn’t give much space to the idealism that animates these radicals, his depiction of this kind of creeping Thatcherisation of bourgeois would-be revolutionaries looks like a prediction of Blairism. In the 1990s, he implies, these are the people who will support a revitalised Labour Party. In this way, “new” men pave
the way for “new” Labour.
This revival by Silver Thread Productions is directed by Stephen Glover, who, in the first half especially, struggles to find a good balance between the play’s dark comedy and its serious passions. His young ensemble cast have a variety of strengths. I was particularly impressed by Richard Crawley’s smooth Will, Victoria Strachan’s bossy Ronee and Lawrence Sheldon’s reptilian Mark. Gordon Ridout’s drunken rant as Oliver is a highpoint. This is a competent revival of a contemporary classic that whets your appetite for more.
Aleks Sierz
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