Shocking new play dissects #MeToo with razor-sharp satire

THEATRE
ULSTER AMERICAN ★★★★
Red Stitch Actors Theatre, until September 19

A satire on misogyny, male privilege, celebrity and the emptiness of political correctness in the theatre industry. Is it too soon? Not if it’s sharp enough, and provocateur David Ireland certainly whets the blade in Ulster American, which opens with a gambit guaranteed to offend almost anyone.

A Hollywood actor (Steve Bastoni) and a British theatre director (David Whiteley) meet in London and can’t resist putting dicks on the table in a competitive display of wokeness. But beneath the surface chat – to the tune of ‘hooray for diversity and marginalised voices’ and ‘down with homophobia and sexism’ – lurk ignorance and prejudice.

Feigning ‘wokeness’: Steve Bastoni and David Whiteley.Credit:Teresa Noble

When they talk gender, the actor doesn’t know Bechdel was a woman (the 'Bechdel test' measures whether there are two women characters talking about something other than a man); when they talk race, the director confuses gay black writer and activist James Baldwin with the – very white – actor Alec Baldwin. Oops.

No one escapes unscathed from Ireland’s vicious satire

Then the Hollywood tough guy poses the least woke hypothetical of all time: Could rape ever be justified? (If you had a gun to your head … If you were captured by terrorists threatening to detonate a nuke unless… Would you? And if so, who would you choose?)

Steve Bastoni and Sarah Sutherland.Credit:Teresa Noble

The director is totally repulsed but, desperate to keep the star on side, humours him until the playwright – a no-nonsense woman from Belfast (Sarah Sutherland) – arrives.

Initially she’s starstruck, but as discussions proceed, the characters flail through a minefield of identity and gender politics – everything from toxic masculinity to Brexit – and the stage breaks into open warfare.

Brett Cousins directs a strong cast. No one escapes unscathed from Ireland’s vicious satire, and the actors take to it with exceptional relish.

Offensive yet cutting: Ulster American.Credit:Teresa Noble

Bastoni is grostequely funny as a reformed alcoholic A-List celeb with a brittle ego and an even thinner grasp of everything else, whose tokenism proves a fig leaf for unreconstructed misogyny.

Whiteley’s obsequious director, strained through the excruciation and pomposity of an entitled Englishman convinced he’s a good egg, makes a perfect partner in crime.

Together, they fuel utterly contemporary hideous men with the classic dynamic of British-American comedy duo, though Sarah Sutherland has the last laugh as a tough, ambitious artist who, when the chips are down, stands ready and willing to wield a new kind of power.

Easily offended audiences will be, but Ulster American works a complex and provocative comedy from intricate cultural politics, in an industry that still has a long way to go.

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