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What Would Judas Do?Product: World Remix/ What Would Judas Do? – Bush Theatre

By Sarah Hemming in Financial Times Posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

As well as being a playwright, Mark Ravenhill is also a witty and astute newspaper columnist, writing about the business of being a playwright.

And in a sense, it is this Ravenhill who is to the fore in Product: World Remix, his mordant hour-long monologue satirising the movie industry (the first of these two short shows). Ravenhill plays James, a monstrous film producer trying to sell an unspeakably tasteless script to the bankable actress he needs on board to sell the project. She sits, poised in mute disdain as he gives a blow-by-blow account of the excesses of the story.

It is a piece of post-9/11 schlock about a beautiful western woman who falls in love with a “dusky” stranger named Mohammed and is drawn into his plans for jihad.

Ravenhill the writer is acidly funny about the moral vacuity of his character, whose avowed sensitivity sees no problem in making dollars out of suicide bombers, banking on fear and reducing critical global tensions to a series of slickly filmed images. Ravenhill the actor plays him as a vulture in a designer suit, circling round his target, creepy in his desperation as he alternately crows, flatters and wheedles. Jo Lobban, meanwhile, is delightful as the silent actress, occasionally raising her perfectly plucked eyebrows in faint surprise as the script takes yet another implausible twist.

It is mercilessly funny and written with panache. It is also necessarily unsubtle, the drawback to this being that it goes on for some time after the point has been made. Still, expect to see Mohammed and Me on some screen or other sometime.

Product: World Remix is playing alongside What Would Judas Do? by Stewart Lee.

Lee is a stand-up comedian and brings his skill at working an audience to bear on this short play. He plays Judas Iscariot, here to explain his behaviour. His Judas is a fervent but not very bright disciple, a would-be revolutionary, disappointed that his leader did not capitalise on his chance to bring the social structure tumbling down and convinced that his role, in betraying Jesus, is to carry forward the work.

It is a droll yet thought-provoking piece, and Lee charms his audience by roving round the theatre, handing out packets of nuts for correct answers to questions on scripture and drafting them in to eat bread and drink wine at the Last Supper.

Ingenious and interesting.

Written by Sarah Hemming in Financial Times on 16th January 2007. Filed Under: Reviews, What Would Judas Do?
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