Squat would be a great name for a nightclub, and heading into the Pilch this week that looks like what it is. Clubbers off their faces accost you on the way in asking for a light, red-necked bouncers demand ID, and once inside there's a scuzzy, stained, chequerboard dance floor, some monumentally cute disco lights and a thumping rave track that has all the early arrivers nodding their heads in mute rhythm as they check their phones. It's the closest I've got to a nightclub for years, but things don't seem to have changed much since the days of The Hitman and Her (look it up).
Except... it's not a nightclub. It's a memory of last night's nightclub. And as the cold light of day cruelly illuminates the filthy domestic setting of Juliet Taub's phenomenally enjoyable, sinfully pleasurable new play, we realise that our cast of five frenemies are in fact living in a squat.
As with Orla Wyatt's A&E, playing this week at the Burton Taylor Studio, Squat demonstrates the oldest maxim about theatre: script is King. And Taub is a scriptwriter par excellence. Every caustic line has a job to do, and not a moment is wasted. Taub reveals details of plot, relationship, backstory, with speed and style, but she also teases the audience, leaving us to piece things together for ourselves. And the cool, V8 motor that purrs through her play is a constant volley of bizarre, absurd, but somehow believable comedy. Lines like "I always know what time it is - got keen senses, like an armadillo" or simply the incredulous "No fucking pineapples?" keep us in a parallel, McDonagh-esque landscape where people speak a kind of elevated form of English: bizarre, poetic and ridiculous. (And speaking of Martin McDonagh, Squat must rival In Bruges for the title of most uses of the word "fuck" per hour - every one of them a little gift.)
Just when you think Squat is going to be an amusing look into the squalid lives of some penniless party animals, shit starts to go down. A gun appears. Someone gets killed. The police turn up. This play has a genuine plot: a jokey, surreal, tongue-in-cheek one, sure, but it takes the characters to places neither they nor the audience ever thought they would go. The jarring combination of drunk students and dead bodies makes it feel like Shallow Grave performed by The Young Ones.
Squat also wields a full magazine of theatrical effects, which it shoots off with deadly accuracy: flashbacks in the middle of conversations; the same scene acted out different ways according to different characters' perspectives; occasional awareness of the audience's presence; a scene acted out in dumb show while the friends' thoughts play out over the sound system. There's even a soupcon of meta-theatre, when reluctant murderer Dave says, "Fuck, I'm out of breath", and the reply is, "Yeah, flashbacks are the worst."
Like Reservoir Dogs, Squat feels like an explosion of talent with a serious intent throbbing away somewhere deep inside, but the audience is too busy gazing in rapt attention - or laughing - to worry about it.
The actors, it may not surprise you to learn, do a uniformly expert job with the juicy material at their disposal, and there is some impressively fancy footwork in the disco scenes too.
Given the amount of action and surprising twists in the play, there are perhaps a couple too many times when the five friends circle back to find themselves saying the equivalent of "What the hell are we going to do?" and it might benefit from a tightening tweak of a few minutes here and there. But every cut would mean losing something uncuttable. Such is the enviable job of an editor with an embarrassment of riches.
What a week for new writing at Oxford. As the great young playwrights of the last generation, like Oisin Byrne and Alec Tiffou, move on to pastures new, a fresh generation steps up to show that great theatre may often be deep, philosophical, tragic and real. But at its best it's also - and perhaps most importantly of all - fun.