A View From Islington North, Arts Theatre, review: 'A bit disappointing and underpowered'

An evening of five political satirical playlets from David Hare, Caryl Churchill, Mark Ravenhill and Alistair Beaton ​

Steve John Shepherd and Sarah Alexander star in A View From Islington North (Robert Workman)

Max Stafford-Clark has teamed up with some of the UK's most eminent dramatists for this evening of five satirical playlets presented by his first-rate Out of Joint touring company. So it's all the sadder to report that the venture is a bit disappointing and underpowered – a sequence of pot shots at fairly obvious targets. Though perfectly commendable, it's unlikely to ignite a fire in anyone's belly or rouse further debate in this historic Referendum season.

The two best pieces are the weirdest. In Caryl Churchill's Tickets Are Now On Sale, a young couple have a banal domestic exchange which is then repeated several times with the same intonation pattern but with the phrases insidiously replaced by corporate-speak, buzzwords, brand names and journalistic cliché (“I had oil in the park. Nice and BP”). The resulting delirious nonsense sounds both abstract and worrying close to home, suggesting a world where discourse itself now requires sponsorship.

David Hare's contribution Ayn Rand Takes A Stand is even odder. It imagines that a struggling George (“Don't call me Gideon”) Osborne summons up the dead Russian-American novelist and High Priestess of capitalism and unleashes her on Theresa May whose immigration policies she subjects to a blistering free-market critique. The strains within conservatism (propounding the “British values” of “extreme tolerance” except where that comes into conflict with, erm, British values) are exposed by Rand who, in Ann Mitchell's magnificent performance, is an hilarious/terrifying monstre sacre of ruthless seductiveness, accoutred as if for Dynasty.

Alistair Beaton and Stella Feehily provide sketches that are more Yes, Minister than The Thick Of It in their take on back-room machinations. In the former's The Accidental Leader, Bruce Alexander is very funny as an exasperated Right-wing backbencher attempting to orchestrate a coup against Jeremy Corbyn (never named) with artfully timed Cabinet resignations. The leakiness of the digital age that foils the plotters is amusingly handled but the wrangle about the benefits and drawbacks of having Corbyn as leader proffers too few fresh insights. In Feehily's mordant How To Get Ahead In Politics, Alexander reappears as Tory Chief Whip in the process of sacking an MP for not reporting a groping colleague. It's electoral wheeler-dealing not a progressive principled stand against sexual harrassment that's the reason for this, though. When the unrepentant MP hears that he's being replaced by a female Cambridge Double First, for example, he ripostes “But she's Asian. This is Bury St Edmunds!”.

The evening begins with a bang as Sarah Alexander, who plays the working-class title character in Mark Ravenhill's explosive The Mother opens the door to two uniformed soldiers and does everything in her desperate, expletive-spitting power to fend off the news that her squaddie son has been killed in battle. It ends with a song written by Billy Bragg in which the company asks us “What's the point of winning at any cost/If everything remains the same?”. But the pieces are, on the whole, accomplished rather than inspired or an inspiring spur to change the world.

Until 2 July; Box Office 020 7836 8463