BWW Reviews: VICTOR or POWER TO THE CHILDREN, The Calder Bookshop Theatre, June 12 2010

The Calder Bookshop, nestling between The Old Vic and The Young Vic on London's South Bank, recalls the pre-Amazon days when the price-fixing Net Book Agreement allowed specialist bookshops to appear on many high streets - their sites are Starbucks now. Drag yourself away from the musty tomes lounging on the shelves or prostrate on the tables, and you find a little theatre at the back of the shop, the venue for King's College London's Alumni Theatre Society's production of Jim Chadburn's new translation of Roger Vitrac's Victor or Power to the Children.

Set in a bourgeois Parisian apartment, the play opens with the eponymous Victor exercising his power over the family's maid, as he smashes a vase and smarmily informs her how he will ensure that she will take the blame. Victor is a kind of reverse of Oskar from the Tin Drum - Grass' hero resolved to remain silent inside the body of a three-year-old; Vitrac's is determined to have his say and, at nine-years-old, has the body and knowledge of an adult married to the casual cruelty of a spoilt child. The shattering of the vase is followed by the shattering of the family, as Victor cajoles his friend Esther to play out publicly the seduction of her mother by his father that she had witnessed the previous evening. Vitrac, being a surrealist, is not satisfied with breaking up the home literally and metaphorically, he also introduces a female visitor to the apartment who offends and then amuses with incessant, if apologetic, farting to destroy the social mores too.

The amateur cast have enormous fun with this material, since bringing carefully hidden hypocrisy to the surface is always a delight (as Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones show in this controversial sketch that would have amused Vitrac). Steven Rhodes delivers a virtuoso turn as the cuckolded Antoine, whose Tourettish outbursts are provoked relentlessly by Victor and Sophia Murday as Emilie is splendidly simpering over her son and waspishly wicked to her philandering husband.

Of course, it all ends in tears, since, as in the Weimar Republic to the East, the artists of 1920's France knew that their time was limited and so made the most of it without losing sight of the fatalism that suffused all aspects of inter-war life. Vitrac's play, like most surrealist work, is heavy-handed, never making a point once when there's the chance to make it half a dozen times, but that doesn't detract from the play's central message that beneath genteel exteriors rages an atavistic turmoil - as true today as ever it has been.