Review of Search & Destroy (Evening Standard Newspaper)
26/01/2001

Dir: Simon Cox.
Shane Taylor, Ben Nealon and Lucy Scott

When young Martin Mirkheim, a silly, dollarless American, who majors in lies and wild ambition, sets out to redeem his messed-up life by making a major movie from a trashy book, you expect him to do the decent thing and end up on the skids.

So much for expectation. In Search and Destroy, Howard Korder's scathing state-of-the-nation report on late Eighties America, the anti-hero's downhill progress is eventually reversed: an act of desperate violence and a lucky break somehow help make his dream come true in Hollywood. Korder's play, presented in New York and at the Royal Court in the Nineties and filmed in Martin Scorsese's production, therefore allows the triumph of amorality and bad taste.

Simon Cox's production cannot, however, dis-guise the fact that Search and Destroy, however enjoyable in its mordant fashion, is conceived in relentless broad-brush strokes and is as one-sided as a politician. Everyone is more or less mad, bad or dangerous to know. Even if some good man appeared and lost out, Korder's indictment would be strengthened. And the play's impact would be strengthened if we saw just how Mirkheim finally breaks into Hollywood to do some damage. But as a black, if over-loquacious, satire on the American Dream, Search and Destroy achieves a bleak vitality.

The staging - with the odd prop manoeuvred round a bare, grey-painted stage, while Mirkheim makes his odyssey around America - is old-fashioned and dull. Some symbolic set would be more engaging. Shane Taylor's Mirkheim, an imposing, young hustler, whose empty chatter and mendacious bravado is reminiscent of one of David Mamet's chancers, radiates a pathetic absurdity as his life falls noisily apart.

Assailed by the taxman, his estranged wife, and best friend, Mirkheim, with almost nothing left to lose but his clothes, continues his grand patter and chatter as he lies his way around. "I've eaten myself up," he eventually confesses-with justice. Korder has a good eye and ear for American crazies and weirdos, who cross Mirkheim's path or double-cross him on the road to success. Ben Nealon as Martin's cool partner in crime and fantasy sounds too English. But Michael Hadley's sinister self-help guru, Lucy's Scott's weird secretary with a disgustingly violent film-script on her mind and Paul Barnhill's wild, coked-out bravado, catch the disquieting spirit of Korder's lament for America.