Blind and Doing the Business – review

Photograph by Sean Turner

The commercialisation of art and sponsorship are the main focus of Triple Jump Production’s double-bill of plays by Doug Lucie.

The first play, Doing the Business, is the stronger of the two. First performed at the Royal Court in 1990, the play still has plenty to say about contemporary theatre. It focuses on a business meeting between slick businessman Peter (Matthew Carter) and his old friend Mike (Jim Mannering), an artistic director of a theatre for new writing who needs financial help.

Mike desperately tries to explain that new writing is vital, but Peter is less interested in controversial new plays trying to humanise the IRA, but more concerned with safe theatre that will serve customers and bring in the profit. Mike’s increasing frustration and anger is well mounted by Mannering and Carter’s smarmy businessman is a worthy antagonist.

Sponsorship turns to censorship, and censorship turns to ownership as Mike enters a Faustian bargain with Peter. Although the play is firmly rooted in the 1990s of Charlie Dance and Imogen Stubbs, it still asks important questions.

The second play, Blind, was originally presented as a radio play in 2002. Paul Stone (Daniel York), a wealthy art collector turns his foul-mouthed, Tracey Emin-like protégé Maddy Burns (Janna Fox) into a household name. When Maddy’s antics become too public for Paul, he turns his attention to a naïve young painter, Alan Gillespie (Cameron Harie) – whose patron, Mo Dyer (John McKenna), has a mysterious past.

Unfortunately, Lucie’s attack on the contemporary art world lacks the subtlety to be effective. I found myself cringing at the unlikeable characters of Alan and Maddy, with their ‘demons’ and bad cocaine habits. Whereas Doing the Business was brisk, Blind was overlong. McKenna and York, however, were excellent as the two older patrons of the young artists.

In Doing the Business, Peter remarks that nobody wants to see new writing except the ‘middle class riff-raff’, students and concessionaries. The audience at the Courtyard let out a knowing laugh; a quick glance behind revealed a barely filled auditorium of bookish types and students. Lucie’s plays, depressingly, show that not too much has changed.

Blind and Doing the Business is at the Courtyard Theatre, Bowling Green Walk, N1 6EU until 23 February.