Wonderful comedy of manners: Kiln Theatre's The Purists reviewed (2024)

A slice of the ghetto arrives at the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn. The Purists is set on the stoop of a crumbling block in Queens, New York, and the show declares its urban credentials as a boombox slams out a hip-hop rhythm and Mr Bugz, a DJ, enters, mike in hand. He urges the audience to commit arson and murder using a chant inspired by the theatre’s location. ‘Kill! Burn!’ he screams. ‘Kill! Burn!’ He invites the crowd to join in his riotous incantation. ‘Kill! Burn!’ they shout back with blood-curdling obedience. After this homicidal overture, the play settles down and turns into a surprisingly genteel comedy of manners.

Mr Bugz makes friends with an Anglophile neighbour, Gerry Brinsler, who adores musical theatre and has a soft spot for her late Majesty. ‘A magnificent reign, magnificent!’ he intones, almost singing the stresses of his words. ‘An absolutely magnificent reign. From the age of 25 to the age of 96. And did she ever complain? Not once. She got up and she went to work every day. No excuses.’ Gerry spends his afternoons padding around in his underwear and lamenting the decline of musical theatre since the glory days of Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers and George Gershwin. It’s hard to believe that this mincing aesthete would socialise with DJs and hip-hop artists, but the collision of cultures is fun to watch. Gerry (a superb Jasper Britton) suspects that Mr Bugz is a closeted gay whose sexuality would terrify his homophobic peers. So he decides to seduce him. Their affair becomes the main narrative thread which is offset by a discursive element about music and society. (This is a very wordy play and all the better for it.)

Mr Bugz’s best friend, Lamont, is a faded hip-hop star who regrets that the genre has lost touch with its roots. Hip-hop, he explains, began as a revolt against gangsterism that enabled young hotheads to challenge their foes through music rather than by shooting them in turf wars. Gerry introduces Lamont to his young friend Nancy who wants to celebrate the life of Amelia Earhart in a hip-hop musical. This idea is equally distressing to both Lamont and Gerry as it violates their adored musical genres in different ways. Gerry must defeat his prejudices and embrace Nancy’s show while Lamont has to come to terms with Mr Bugz’s homosexuality. And that’s all that happens in this play. It’s not much but it’s plenty. A wonderful show. The only letdown is the scruffy, overcomplicated set which is a true eyeball-jabber.

The Unseen by Craig Wright studies the issue of nihilistic despair under the rule of a military dictator. Two captives in solitary confinement find that they can chat to each other thanks to an error in the prison’s design. They chat away. Chat, chat, chat. They never stop chatting. Wallace, a doctor, prattles about the harmless joke that led to his incarceration. His friend, Valdez, blathers about a female prisoner who plans to escape through a catacomb of underground tunnels that was incorporated in the jail’s design. Obviously, the prison needs to be demolished and rebuilt from scratch. Or perhaps Valdez has been driven nuts by captivity and is hallucinating. It doesn’t much matter.

Enter a sadistic guard, Smash, who menaces both men with a big black truncheon. This scene involves lots of shouting and whimpering but no drama at all since the three characters are unchanged by the encounter. Smash exits and returns later with blood dripping from his hands. He delivers a long speech – another one – describing acts of torture inflicted on an unnamed prisoner for unexplained reasons. The level of detail is revolting and yet the speech has little emotional impact because the victim is unknown to us. Nor is he known to Wallace or Valdez.

The show feels like a clumsy homage to Pinter’s punishingly dull political plays. It’s all talk and no movement. The most promising moment comes when Valdez advances the theory that new trends in fashion are heralded by changes in the design of buttons. He heard this from his mother, a seamstress, who argued that buttons are the smallest and cheapest feature of any garment and therefore an ideal subject for creative experiment. That’s quite interesting. And well worth discussing if you’re stuck in a gulag for 30 years – but Valdez has no specialised knowledge to back up his theory. So it’s forgotten. And we’re back to the start: two babbling halfwits rotting to death.

At the close of the play, the internal discipline of the jail breaks down suddenly and the convicts are free to escape. Or is it a trick? Hard to say. And even harder to care. The writer wants to remind us that the bars of the mind are stronger than those of a physical jail. Fair enough. We knew that already. Can we leave now?