ANDREW PLEAVIN
Photo: Clay Enos
Reviews of Penetrator
Time Out 1
Anthony Neilson's trademark association of sex and distress is there for all to see in the extraordinary Penetrator, with which the playwright kick started the trend for experiential, confrontational theatre. Ten years on, the updated Penetrator remains a horrifically tense exercise in dramatic aggression. Neilson's achievement is deftly to pick at the homoerotic/homophobic threads of two blokish flat-mates' relationship then throw the feckless pair into contact with the nightmarish endpoint of their banter. Andrew Pleavin gives a monstrous rendition of psychosexual trauma as Tadge, the childhood friend who's escaped the army, and the 'penetrators' who tortured him them. The knife he stole from barracks could as easily be used to cut the atmosphere in the Latchmere Theatre as it could slice the neck of the luckless Alan. Neilson's territory here is the black hole where repressed homosexuality meets state sanctioned male violence. Is it any wonder his characters are in headlong flight from the sexual complications of adulthood? On the supposed eve of war, the play seems doubly timely. Bill Buckhurst's production is drum tight and well worth seeing.
-Bryan Logan
Time Out 2
Anthony Neilson was one of the leading proponents of 1990s 'in yer face' drama - a fittingly inelegant label for an often deliberately graceless but vital type of theatre focused on violence, confrontation and abjection. Penetrator dates from 1993, and was originally set during the first Gulf War; for Bill Buckhurst's sharply directed revival, Neilson has updated the action to the more recent Iraq conflict. He needn't have bothered, since the play doesn't really derive its force from its military context, but rather from the big 1990s theme of masculinity in crisis. Penetrator is a bit like an X-rated episode of "Men Behaving Badly."
...Period piece it may be, but thanks, in large part, to three tremendous performances it still has the power to shock in Buckhurst's production (first seen earlier this year in slightly variant form). Simon Lenagan and Simon Lloyd play "odd couple' flat-mates Max and Alan. Max enjoys pornography, masturbation and the odd snort of coke, while Alan prefers tea, teddies and tidiness. The pair are united, however, by their love of Laurel and Hardy, and Adam and the Ants.
...One evening, Max's childhood friend Tadge arrives on their doorstep, freshly discharged from the army. This ultra violent automaton with soulful blue eyes, brilliantly played by Andrew Pleavin has blood on his face and 'penetrators' - men who he claims conspired to bugger him with a broom handle - on his mind. What happens next is rather disturbing. Provided you find bad language inherently amusing, it's an evening of very funny-and extremely dark-black comedy.
-Robert Shore
TNT
It's a mad mix for an opening scene. A warped porn voiceover, a man wanking on a couch, smoking and snorting coke. You have our attention. Anthony Neilson delivers a theatrical punch with this updated production tackling the issues of sexuality within the confines of male "mateship'. .........Penetrator is intense, but strategically sewn with dark humour thanks to the stage chemistry between Max (Simon Lenagan) and Alan (Simon Lloyd). The tone of the play shifts when Tadge (Andrew Pleavin), returns from Iraq. His bulk and presence are both threatening and pitiful.
Pleavin's performance carries not only the dehumanisation of the war, but the tragic consequence of it. Powerful stuff.
-Anna Kiss-Gyorgy
Evening Standard
Anthony Neilson is not the kind of playwright you'd want to take home to meet your mother Every other word - and for frequent vitriol packed bursts even the 'other' is optional - is an expletive and his work tends to raise the uncomfortable question of whether his prime desire is to shock an audience rather than to communicate any particular point of view.
And yet, uncomfortable viewing as they may be, pieces such as last year's award winning Stitching are compelling in their brutal honesty and so it proves with this updated take on his 1993 male-psyche-in-crisis play Penetrator.
...Originally set to a backdrop of the first Gulf War Neilson takes as a stimulus here the current conflict in Iraq. Disaffected twenty-something Max (Simon Lenagan) has firm opinions: "If only they could start bombing again we could have some decent TV." In the absence of this, he fills the void with porn, cigarettes, alcohol and drugs. Violence and misogyny simmer menacingly bringing to mind Neil Laflute's discomforting film "In the Company Of Men." Here, as there, a relationship gone sour proves the catalyst for outpourings of bile.
...Pacifist flat-mate Alan (Simon Lloyd) tiptoes around mad Max, until old friend Tadge (Andrew Pleavin) with the face of an android who has been discharged for reasons unclear, arrives with his army issue knife. Then the fireworks truly start, with this excellent trio of actors ratcheting up the tension to almost unwatchable levels. Director Bill Buckhurst keeps a firm grip on proceedings even though the mood spins so frequently balancing out the dark side of Neilson's writing with some fine touches of humour, such as the wonderful song-and-dance routine Max and Alan perform to The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Toxic male such as these, with their brutal loathing of humanity in general and teddy bears in particular, should be avoided everywhere except at the Old Red Lion.
-Fiona Mountford
Metro
Penetrator (1993) was the play that first brought Anthony Neilson to prominence. It's easy to see why. Man and Max, two twenty something flatmates, have their comfortable. blokeish squalor abruptly interrupted when their old friend Tadge unexpectedly turns up.
...A recently discharged squaddie, he is dearly in the grip of a psychosis - prompted by a gang rape he says he was subjected to in the Army by a group he calls 'the penetrators.'
As he becomes convinced that Alan is in some way involved, so the play's themes are distilled through the neat prism of male friendship. The brutalising institutionalisation of the Army, the way latent homoeroticism is channelled into homophobia and misogyny, and the corrosion of the boundaries between reality and pornographic fantasy rise savagely to a climax of almost unbearable dramatic tension.
...Director Bill Buckhurst has subtly tweaked his production, first seen at the Latchmere earlier this year, with updates references to Iraq and George Bush, and in doing so makes the play's implicit anti-military position overt. He squeezes every last chop of threat and fear from this crude, overtly metaphorical but powerful play. It may not be the most sophisticated thing currently about but it's certainly among the most visceral.
-Claire Allfree