Life During Wartime is a play about security. We know this from the first scene in which the impeccably menacing John Sharian is doing the hard sell to a suitably impressed Helene Wilson on the need to buy a burglar alarm. This being America, the security device stands for everything Americans cherish about their homes, their privacy and their safety.
{0}Sharian is built like a light-heavyweight boxer and has a stubbly hairstyle, and just in case we don't realise that he's not quite the perfect gentleman, he plays a character called Heinrich. Death of a close friend of a salesman, perhaps. But does he get his trousers off? Luckily not, because the love interest comes from Heinrich's callow apprentice Tommy.
Tommy is hoping to learn the ropes of security device salesmanship, but instead finds himself trespassing all over the gorgeous frame of a divorcee called Gale, played with some flair by Helene Kvale.
When Heinrich tells Tommy that they like to soften up potential clients by giving them a taste of what life could be like without an intruder alarm, our own plot sensors are bleeping like the Bishops Avenue after an electric storm. By the end, poor, distraught by Craig Pinder as John Calvin (yes, that John Calvin, 1509-64) in a narrow beard and black cap. Pinder - who is terrific in another guise when he gives young Tommy a demonstration in gun patter that would out-spiel even Heinrich - wedges himself into the scene changes to harangue us on the subject of "it is our destiny to sin".
He occasionally dumbs the message down with asides such as, "OK, I'm harping on about this", and calling on Natural Born Killers and NYPD Blue as his witnesses to the fact that mankind is inherently corrupt and self-corrupting. So goes America, too. American Keith Reddin's script swings between some very good jokes, and some rather ponderous posthumous orations, but the cast - not forgetting the eye-catchingly named Peter Youngblood-Hills as Gale's likeably slouching teenage son - are jointly excellent.
Life During Wartime
