League tables, inspections, OFSTED, performance related pay… If you haven't yet been given an earful by a public servant, or worried yourself about the emphasis placed on tables and targets by the government and an increasingly confused public, then 'England Inspects,' will give you pause for thought, bringing inspection culture right to your doorstep - and beyond.

Spitting Image writer Mike Coleman takes the idea of the Nanny State to its logical conclusion, with the introduction of The Office for Standards in Offspring Development, or, naturally, OFFSOD. The scene is the home of Sheila and Barry Smith and their children; an ordinary family with ordinary problems, whose gently dysfunctional lives are rudely interrupted by the arrival of government inspector Howard Chubb (Bill Moulford), with a drive for improvement and a detailed program for modern family management. What follows is a farcical disintegration of the family as Barry neglects Sheila and the children in his obsession with following the ever-changing government guidelines, and achieving the status of 'Beacon' family for the area.

The play is consistently pleasing if not always hilarious, and there are some great comic touches, in the studied nonchalance of the children and the scarily cheerful jargon of Chubb. The 50-seater Burton Taylor is a nice venue for a play depicting the blurring of family/state/outside world, as it's not hard to imagine that you've actually wandered into somebody's sitting room (although the intimacy of the place does have the tendency to make everything seem slightly overacted.) The audience is also invited to take on the role of inspectors, and to review the progress of the family on a projector screen, which both legitimises our closeness to the characters and makes us uncomfortably complicit in the intrusion. This mix of slick 'New Labour' satire and politely provocative social comment is not always an easy one, but the ongoing family drama and good performances from the cast, in particular Helen Taylor as a complicated, long-suffering Sheila, and Jon Crowley as her increasingly manic husband, bring more depth to the play than that of an extended sketch.

The point that the quality of family life cannot be measured by filling in 'tick boxes,' and that one's kids are more important than efficient administration, is so straightforward as to become a little wearisome, but some of the gags are terrific, and the overall premise is one that invites the self-satisfied collusion of the audience. It gives us something to think about, but something with which we are already familiar; everyday concerns of ordinary people, political and domestic, taken to their combined extremes and offered up for our amusement. But look over your shoulder as you laugh.

Susie Cogan, March 2004