Working classes get the last laugh

Only masochists would put up with the conditions of employment imposed upon the two bright teenage cartoonists in Simon Block's unfairly ridiculous new play. But then Block, who confesses he adored shovelling elephant excreta into wheelbarrows and hosing gallons of pachyderm urine into sewers when working at London Zoo in his teenage years, clearly wallowed in mucking around in life's lower depths. Unfortunately, Jules and Clarke, the talented, young school-leaver cartoonists in No Exp. Req'd, seem far too normal and sharp to fall for the nasty con-trick dreamed up by two entrepreneurial spivs whose advertisement the school-leavers answer.

The play is intended for those aged 14 and upwards, though surely not very far up. For I imagine Block's genially simplistic style of caricature would find an echo in a little Red Schoolbook piece of agit prop for Soviet Union school kids 30 years ago. The agit-prop, didactic message, like Block's play, would show how two put-upon teenagers were seduced by the offer of £500 per week, to draw a 100 famous cartoon characters to be printed on visiting cards for kids, and ended up almost like slave-labourers. But Block's young cartoonists artfully turn the tables on their tormentors by threatening to withdraw their artistic labour and end up aware that capitalist business is liable to involve processes dirtier than anything dropped by elephants.

Julie-Anne Robinson's deft production coaxes some laughter from the conflict, though Block patronises his potentially young audience by the coarseness of his writing.

The two young cockney businessmen-brothers, especially Jay Simpson's superb Andy, a hustler with a talent to abuse, and from whom aggression and menace drip like sweat in a heat-wave, beggar belief. By guile and deception they would exploit Kaye Wragg's endearing Jules and the puppyish Clarke, played by an actor who identifies himself only by the initials AJ. Instead the cartoonists are deprived of lavatory breaks and food, while hectored with elderly cliches like "This is a business not a charity." Marilyn, the cynical personal assistant, whom the brothers treat like a traditional female drudge until they see the light of political correctness, is played by Helen Schlesinger in inappropriately middle-class tones.

The effect is as odd as catching sight of an Oxford don reading Barbara Cartland.

A Small Drop Of Ink: NO EXP. REQ'D