Product @ the Traverse
Edinburgh theatre: Mark Ravenhill, famous for Shopping and F***ing, has written an hour-long monologue that is his signature mix of tasteless, funny and thought-provoking. It also marks his professional acting debut.
Ravenhill first addresses the audience directly, explaining that he would normally be sitting among us, but fancied being on stage for once. It's a self-penned piece, he says, because he wouldn't be comfortable performing someone else's words, perhaps badly.
He needn't have worried, as he proves himself an able practitioner, although whether Ravenhill can act in a company remains to be seen. He plays Mark, an egotistical writer who is pitching in great detail what he believes is the perfect film script to an actress (Elizabeth Baker), who sits mute throughout.
The film, Mohammed and Me, is a love story of sorts and Mark wants the actress to play Amy, who falls for "a tall, dusky fellow" she meets on a plane. In one of the play's funniest moments, Mark describes Amy's initial, racist response to Mohammed: "You want to reach for a knife and call out: 'This is for the towers! This is for civilisation! This is for all of us, you bastard!' But you don't, because that's interior monologue."
The plot gets ever more surreal, as Mohammed turns into a suicide bomber and Amy plays host to a terrorist cell in her Docklands flat. There's an appearance by Osama bin Laden and a hideously funny self-immolation.
Ravenhill, well directed by Lucy Morrison, is eminently watchable and he manages to find much black humour in a nightmare vision of what our world has become. His targets - the film industry, terrorists and their apologists - are intelligently skewered, although I'm not sure there's a big idea here.
