The Here and This and Now
Southwark Playhouse, London

THE HERE and This and Now dispenses a pharmacological mix of farce and tragedy.

Glenn Waldron’s play, in a Plymouth Theatre Royal production, begins at the “away day” of pharmaceutical company McCabe, with team-bonding exercises, chanting and rehearsed sales pitches performed with varying degrees of success.

Then, we're pitched suddenly into a near future and a very different world in which a virus has had a devastating impact. Antibiotics no longer work and we’re forced to consider how far we’d go to save those we love and how useful Powerpoint might be in a crisis.

At its best, Waldron’s script offers an impressive balance between the highly comic and the deeply tragic, but, at certain moments, the philosophical heft the production attempts to offer in its engagement with the value of life and the banality of the everyday falls a little short.

But, when it’s funny, it’s brilliant. Andy Rush’s Robbie and Becci Gemmell’s Helen stand out in the “away day,” as Gemmell strikingly propels the manic energy of her sales pitch rehearsal into a future marked by loss.

She moves between the awkward and the tragic with remarkable control and it’s a credit to her performance that we really don’t know how far Helen will go to try to save her son.

Simon Stokes's direction keeps the pace moving engagingly and Adrienne Quartly’s soundscape heightens the tension and ensures that even the mundane sales talk is somewhat surreal.

The final moments suggest that pharmaceutical companies, happy to profit from others’ loss,will always win.

But that’s not really a surprising conclusion. The effective moments here are the smaller, more personal ones.

Runs until February 10, box office: southwarkplayhouse.co.uk