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New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Anthony Neilson.
Cast: Jude Akuwudike, Richard Atwill, Thane Bettany, Sam Cox, Brian Doherty, Ryan Gage, Emmanuel Ighodaro, Jason Nwoga, Patrick O'Kane, Mark Theodore, Joel Trill
Description: Major new drama written and directed by Anthony Neilson, working with major acting talent from the Royal Shakespeare Company in creating a tale about fathers and daughters, and men trying to recreate themselves in a virtual environment.
Trains: Tube: Tottenham Court Road 
, Tube / Bus: 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 23, 25, 38, 55, 73, 98, 176 
Phone: 0207478 0100
Website: www.sohotheatre.com
Extra info: Pub, Food
Phantom father: Brian (Brian Doherty, right) is confronted by the ghost of his long-dead dad (Sam Cox)
Michael Boyd, the Royal Shakespeare Company's artistic director, has hit upon a brilliant method of wasting loads of money and talented actors' time while creating abysmal theatre. Anthony Neilson's God in Ruins is the grim result of testing this theory in dramatic practice. Boyd's notion stems from his belief that the relationship between actors and writers can be "reignited" if both parties engage in mutual nourishment in private - the ridiculous phrase is his. Accordingly, Neilson, as both writer and director, was given 11 male actors for several months to help him devise a play, the script of which Boyd had not read, let alone approved, before the programme for God in Ruins was printed.
The ensuing farcical comedy drifts between dream and reality, as if in debased homage to Neilson's own fascinating work The Wonderful World of Dissocia. The clichéd hero, an amalgam of contemporary character flaws and foibles plunged into an aimlessly wandering plot, is given a familiar crisis at Christmas. How can Brian Doherty's alcoholic TV producer of such low-grade reality shows as Chimp Monastery and Pimp My Pooch survive when estranged from his wife, missing his daughter and craving drugs?
Neilson's vignettes of alcoholic despair, whether verbal or situational, strike gross, embarrassing notes. There are neither insights nor insightful, surreal leaps of imagination when Doherty's alcoholic hero summons up the ghost of his long-dead father and travestied scenes from Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
Whether the producer is mocking his homosexual, wheelchair-bound business partner, proposing a series called Guantanamo Gay or confessing, in the style of Patrick Marber's hero in Closer, that he assumes a female identity in internet chat rooms, he remains too trivial, shallow and pantomimic to be taken as a useful immorality figure.
There are disconcerting signs, one of which involves a squaddie back from Basra, that Neilson loses track of his plot just as the producer does of his life. Only when this anti-hero joins an Encounter Group where Mark Theodore's humane actor offers him non-judgmental sympathy does a liberating solution loom. "I think I have never been who I really am," the producer says, hinting his troubles spring from that tired old phenomenon, latent gayness. Shamefully bad.
• Until 5 January (0870 429 6883).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
The play is superbly entertaining despite its rather grim subject matter. What Anthony Neilson has hit upon in plays such as Realism, The Wonderful World of Dissocia and God in Ruins is a way of telling stories of ordinary suffering so as to make them seem epic and even otherworldly. The play contains highly entertaining diversions that shed light on the central story which explodes into a final scene that is both comic and heartbreaking. It also rings an alarm bell about our increasingly atomised society. The play could do with further tightening. I agree with de Jong that the squaddie from Basra episode doesn’t really work and is an unnecessary add-on. However, when a playwright invents an engaging new theatrical language to describe social problems, we should all sit up and listen. I for one look forward to whatever spills out next from Anthony Neilson’s distinctive imagination.
- Jimmy Porter, London, UK
