REVIEW: INSULT TO INJURY at Lion & Unicorn Theatre 9 – 13 April 2024

‘cracking lines … they’re funny and pacy and very good to watch’ ★★★ ½

Kieran Dee and Grace Millie have an ease and a charm on stage that could be bottled and sold for premium prices. They deliver cracking lines with conversational ease, they're funny and pacy and very good to watch.  And they seemingly have ambition to move beyond the no-set, multiple character work they have given the world previously. Ambition is laudable, and by its nature takes writers and performers out of their comfort zones, and unfortunately that is what this show feels like.

The opening scene of “Insult to Injury” introduces us to two compliance officers policing a fraught social medium, balancing free speech against allowing knob-heads to share the horrors they just thought up, conversing, consoling, counselling. It’s fast and funny and convincing. But their enterprise gets gobbled up by a billionaire predator called Vos, taking time out from his busy schedule of private space exploration to destroy communication by communicating. It’s a complicated set-up, it’s a set of ideas that are well worth exploration, and it really doesn’t need the gothic intervention of Nick Hardie, powerfully repulsive as the flip-flop wearing Vos, which turns the discussion into a sort of contemporary horror story, as Vos destroys the livelihoods and lives and reputations of the principals, with an unfettered access to everybody’s on-line existence. Nick Hardie is very good at acting repulsive, it should be made clear, I’m sure he’s lovely in real life.

It is a pity that exceptionally good performers chase their tales up an implausible, over-conceived dead end. It’s a swing and a miss at significance, when the smaller, more personal, more domestic setting articulates the big ideas and does it better.

INSULT TO INJURY at Lion & Unicorn Theatre 9 – 13 April 2024

Box Office https://www.thelionandunicorntheatre.com/whats-on

Produced by Moon Loaf

Reviewed by Chris Lilly