Making the world better

mixing deck, Varjack highlights a reoccurring pattern: artists doing years of training, only to end up working in menial jobs when they’re not making their art (or doing “endless bloody scratching,” as one puts it).

The unfair way organisations value some people’s contributions in the workplace over others, along with recent news stories about pay disparity at the BBC, gives the play a wider resonance.

Varjack asks, if Iggy Pop can’t live off his royalties, what hope is there for the rest of us? Although Iggy then goes on to say it’s “the pursuit of money” that leads to great art, rather than money itself.

The play could do more to explore the complexities surrounding the uneasy relationship between artistic pursuits and capitalism, as well as childhood dreams versus adult realities.

But, as Stella Duffy says in an interview at the end, “Part of your job as an artist is to look at the world around you and make it better.”

And Varjack is certainly doing that. SALLY STOTT

0 Paula Varjack’s refreshingly honest show asks about wages character parodies and the well-deployed if well-worn points of Brexit humour, the satire isn’t biting – in fact, some of it is positively gentle.

Fans of Radio 4 afternoon comedy will enjoy it, but those who wish to see the subject tackled vigorously may not be so keen. DAVID POLLOCK You don’t have to read Poe’s original tale before seeing this clever, sideways adaptation but it will increase your appreciation for the ingenuity shown by its devisers and performers, Olwen Davies and Ollie Smith. If you don’t want to do your homework that’s fine, too, as Smith reads extracts from the original text and comments on changes necessary for the modern-day reworking by Mufaro Makuiba.

Davies and Smith don’t just act out the script; seated at mic’d tables as if it were a radio broadcast, they undercut it with amusing cattiness, act as living footnotes to the text. They’re charming performers in these sections, but the dramatic scenes of marital discord are very well played. Rather than undercutting the tension – as you might expect – the humour actually underlines it and both performers pivot suddenly from comedy to drama exceptionally well.

It’s in these switches of tone that this production flirts with four-star territory but it’s as if it’s afraid to match the sheer horror of the original or push the material into pure travesty when it could most effectively do both. RORY FORD thespace on the Mile (Venue 39) JJ With its stark staging, episodic structure and manic, cagey characters who arrive and disappear without warning, 6th Space Theatre Company’s exploration of political imprisonment is arguably successful in simulating the psychology of its subjects, but falls short of being something you’d recommend.

While the performances are more or less strong (a few patchy accents aside), there’s barely any characterisation in the ensemble – portraying a mix of journalists and aid workers – for audiences to relate to. A subplot featuring one prisoner’s brother on the home front adds some narrative progression, but it’s too slender a thread to tie the whole thing together. NIKI BOYLE