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‘I’ve never read anything Greek, but I bet if feels exactly like this,” says Isabelle (RhéAna Kamalu) at the apocalyptic height of this zingy comedy. She is a gen Z intern whose end-of-times neuroses have suddenly become justified after she receives a government alert to stay indoors. Maybe she did not want to die young, after all.
The line has the characteristic wit of playwright Dan Bishop, author of last year’s Brainsluts, but the scene itself is unexpected. Wind back to the start of Target Audience and you will find something much more ephemeral.
It begins as a jolly send-up of a vacuous screen industry, one beholden to charismatic bullshitters such as Angie – short for Angus (James Coward) – and the tyranny of audience data. We could be watching the BBC satire W1A or David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow as a production company brings in Tobias (Henry Calcutt), a politically sensitive writer, to see if he can add an edge to their scripts in development.
One of these is called Citizen 54, the other Thorns. If it were not for the poster for Horizon (tagline: “The future is round”), you could believe they had never made a film, preferring endless days of platitudes and statistics. With his sidekick Bruiser (Molly Windust, also starring in Rockpools at the fringe), Angie flatters Tobias as quickly as he undermines him. He is not an artist but a cog in the wheel.
If the material is familiar, the actors make it seem fresh in Bishop’s entertaining production. If he got rid of the scene changes, it would be more pacy still. But the playwright is playing the long game and what emerges from the airhead character comedy is a satire about moral compromises that affect not just the telly we watch but the late-capitalist power structures we inhabit. Funny, yes, but also politically astute.
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At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 30 August
English (US) ·