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Your support makes all the difference.Judith Johnson's excellent new play Exclude Me is more exploratory than didactic, but it does leave you with one uncomfortable conclusion. Teachers really ought to be armed. If Ken had taken his pistol into the science lab, he'd have had no discipline problems. His two former pupils, Wayne and prissy Jessica, are certainly compliant now. Disgraced after assaulting Wayne in class, enraged by the ensuing court case and the loss of his job, equipped with gun, video camera, gaffer tape, handcuffs and chains, Ken's taken them prisoner.
The struggling teenagers are affixed to the venue's own radiators. The plastic chairs and plain tables common to schools and arts centres serve for a set. The production is elegant and functional in other ways. Ken's hectoring, lecturing personality makes him a perfect mouthpiece for Johnson's thoughts on the parlous state of education. Exposition comes naturally to a self-righteous pedagogue. The desperate fumbling with padlocks and chains just ratchets up the tension and underlines the pathetic confusion of Ken's master plan ("You're not going to get your job back, Sir ...").
While Katie Donnison's vulnerable, touching Jessica goes for appeasement, Wayne chooses violent resistance, but Michael Obiora makes it clear that lower-lip wobble is never far away. This is a tense, controlled, three-way power struggle. Ken finds that with a gun in his hand, he's magnetic, witty, effortlessly dominating. His cruellest fun comes from tormenting Jessica, ruthlessly peeling off her confident social manner to reveal the anxious fat girl beneath. When she nixes the sandwich fillings she's offered on a variety of ethical and dietary grounds, Ken snaps: "Well, you're fucked then, aren't you?" with an infectious madcap menace.
There's real savagery in the clash of the males. "Batty boy", "Nigger", they snarl at one another, as Jessica bursts into horrified sobs. Yet when Wayne has to pee, and Ken refuses to unchain his hands, he has to adjust the boy's clothing for him: a bizarrely tender moment.
Jonathan Guy Lewis is a mesmerising Ken, swaggering one moment, slowly deflating the next. And the fourth element is Yvonne, Wayne's no-good mother, her pretty face permanently disfigured by a frown. Kay Bridgeman makes her deplorable, yet funny and likeable, and, unlike the rest of them, ferociously self-aware. We might all be living in "little pockets of hell", as Jessica puts it, but the play ends with the prospect of hope for at least two characters.
A more benign power-struggle is on offer in The Little Black Book, a soufflé from Jean-Claude Carrière. A strange young woman walks into a man's flat and makes herself at home (big-city flat dwellers do tend to leave their doors open for intruders). She's looking for a lost love who seems to have given her the wrong address. Tired, fed up, she refuses to leave. But does she already know the owner of the flat? She certainly makes a bee-line for his "little black book" (a large volume) in which he keeps the photos and details of 134 conquests. Is he really the lost love she's after, and have they met before? Has he just forgotten her face?
Without resorting to 'Allo 'Allo accents, it's clear that the characters are supposed to be French. But though they are great performers, Paul McGann is as famously Scouse as Susannah Harker is an archetypal English rose. Their sparring is delicious, but they don't wholly convince as a vain Parisien and the femme mystérieuse who captivates him.
'Exclude Me': Chelsea Theatre, London SW10 (020 7352 1967), to 22 March; 'The Little Black Book': Riverside Studios, London W6 (020 8237 1111), to 15 March
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