Review: Autobahn at Basement Theatre

Todd Emerson captures the geeky awkwardness of a teenager. Photo / Chris Gorman

Neil LaBute has cultivated a reputation as one of theatre's bad boys - notorious for shocking audiences with bitterly funny works that embrace the violence and nastiness lurking beneath the sunny colours of the American dream.

Autobahn is a recent play, representing a mellower, more nuanced examination of the apathy and anger that consumes the inhabitants of Butesville, USA.

The cycle of six short pieces provides a challenging workout for a talented team of 12 actors and six directors assembled under The Emergency Room's mission statement which aims to bring emerging talent into contact with established practitioners.

With all the action confined to the front seat of a car, attention is sharply focused on the subtleties of facial expression, and in the intimate space of the Basement Theatre the actors are exposed to the kind of intensified scrutiny that comes with a big-screen close-up.

The opening play has a silently despairing mother driving home with her delinquent daughter, who has just completed an unsuccessful stint at a rehab facility. Julia Croft's delivery skilfully reveals the manipulative cruelty partially masked by the sweetness of an all-American teenager.

Later, the folly of saying one thing while meaning another is taken to hilarious extremes by Todd Emerson, who captures the geeky awkwardness of an engineering student searching for a way to break up with his potentially psychotic girlfriend.

In all the plays, LaBute displays a virtuoso talent for creating highly charged dialogue in which the patterns of everyday speech are laid out like a minefield - with poisonous malevolence exploding out of the spaces between seemingly innocuous words.

The inadequacy of speech is given its clearest expression in Ross Anderson's riveting performance as a middle-aged loser tormented by his inability to find words capable of expressing his true feelings.

A more positive take on the potency of words comes with Annie Whittle's powerful performance as a self-absorbed housewife who draws on her experiences in high-school plays to spin out an intricately extended metaphor based on the absence of speed limits on the German autobahns.