'For Your Entertainment' is a dazzlingly black exploration of guilt, self-expression and sexuality that touches on paedophilia, masturbation, rape and cancer. Quite strong for ten past eleven on a Monday morning, but it is a sophisticated, measured, literate and occasionally shocking piece that shuns the facile and the gratuitous. In his programme notes, writer-director Boris Mitkov acknowledges the influence of Todd Solondz' 'Happiness' and David Slade's 'Hard Candy'. I would add Ryan Murphy and even Michael Haneke to that list. The play is narrated by an eerily charismatic clown, who glides in and out of the action to point out certain details and foreshadow others; he seldom judges or intervenes, but he is capable of the sort of narrative deception one finds in modernist novels (Gide, especially). Similar to a consciously sadistic, audience-aware rewind in Haneke's 'Funny Games', the mother's recovery from cancer is played out, then abandoned by the clown in favour of a bleaker prognosis that will preserve the dramatic tension.The stylish, haunting opening scene is a dance of death to the strains of Muse's 'Undisclosed Desires', and the physical intertwining of the characters preludes internal echoes amongst disparate characters later in the play. Patrick finds Sarah's diary as Phil does his wife's journal, whilst the coke-snorting gay psychiatrist abuses his profession to get closer to Phil as Phil does to his pupil Ellie, and yet no two characters are able to connect. This is particularly Solondzian, and one of the few criticisms I'd have of the play was that the humour could have been richer and deeper. The clown narrator is an effective ironic device, but the frame of a sugary Trisha-style chatshow quickly loses steam. There is nothing as funny, for instance, as the magnificently perverse moment in Solondz' 'Happiness' when Dylan Baker tells his son he's a child rapist.That said, this is a taut, ambitious and layered work with some really impressive flourishes. The acting is universally strong, with Eileih Muir's endearing, but desperate Sarah and Daisy Ward's sexually precocious Ellie a fascinating yin and yang of teenage girl sexual discovery. Max Wilson is riveting as Philip, and his monologue on the 'rainbow of emotions' he felt during the rape is possibly the finest moment of the play. The ghoulish, hypnotic, Massive Attack-tinted ante-finale, a throwback of sorts to the dance at the start, has the sort of twisted poetry one might find at a video exhibition at the Tate Modern and completes the horribly restrained cycle.I really enjoyed this. Not an easy watch at times, but the characterisation is textured and authentically ambiguous, the writing is unusual with one or two moments of real class, the acting mature and understated, and the direction superb. Boris Mitkov: remember the name.
