Night of suspense at the Royal Court
Theatre etiquette is puzzling. You sit with complete strangers in a confined space, sharing intense emotions. Sometimes, during an especially scary bit, you might grip your neighbour's arm in sympathy. But after the show you shoot off into the night. You do not - I stress, not - expect to find yourself suspended in a glass cube (like a bad David Blaine stunt) with four complete strangers.
Last Thursday I went with a friend to see Polly Stenham's Tusk, Tusk in the theatre upstairs at the Royal Court. It's a brilliant shock assault on the middle classes. You come out reeling in the interval.We rushed down three flights to the bar, words spilling out of us (had Stenham met our families?), and downed several red wines.
Then, realising we had two minutes to get back upstairs, we jumped into the Court's modish glass lift. The doors slammed on my friend Sarah Jane's cleavage, making her hurl her drink over the other people in the lift. "Please God don't let us be sitting next to them," I thought.
It got worse. The lift refused to budge. One kind woman instructed her teenage son to get out and walk. The lift set off, then ground to a halt between floors two and three. It was like the worst sort of expressionist play - Sartre's Huis Clos, perhaps - where the lead characters are doomed to spend eternity together.
"I'm trapped with five women," the man of the party wailed.
"My son will think we've abandoned him," the mother fretted. We tried not to panic.
But tension was mounting. A sweet Royal Court girl who could see us hanging in mid-air kept saying: "We'll do what we can."
"Don't let them start the second act," I called out.
"Maybe we could get compensation," Sarah Jane suggested, a gleam in her eye.
By now we were paddling in red wine. Sweating. Pressed cheek to jowl. I dropped my handbag, spilling the contents, including a sample pack of Pasante condoms, helpfully sent in by a PR (don't ask). Everyone averted their eyes.
It was clear we couldn't be uptight Brits any more. Tentatively, we began chatting. "It's going to be OK," I thought. Fringe audience who go and see plays about domestic horror bond together.
Ten minutes later the lift spat us out. We took our seats, stifling hysterical laughter. All credit to the playwright. Polly, your people are my people. Even in an elevator shaft.
