Theatre review: Affluenza

Riverside Studios have taken the unusual step of launching a major season of five plays, importing off-Broadway director Andy Sandberg to curate the season and direct all the shows, as well as writing the opener. As far as I can tell Sandberg doesn't even seem to be a particularly big name in New York so I'm not sure what led to the red carpet being laid out for him to this extent - maybe the venue was hoping people would misread his name as Andy Samberg and get some ticket sales in? In any case I'm sure their confidence in him is justified, and he wouldn't open the season with a show whose title has already become a byword for disaster within days of its opening, would he? Affluenza opens in the aftermath of a car crash, in which 16-year-old drunk driver Dylan (Noah Schnapp) has caused a three-car collision, killing at least two people.

His lawyer Bradley (Rupert Young) finds him alarmingly unable to take any responsibility for his actions, an attitude that's matched by his wealthy parents (Juliet Cowan and Donald Sage Mackay.) Bradley decides that this incredibly unlikeable defendant might actually win with what he calls the Affluenza Defence - putting the blame on his parents for using their extreme wealth and privilege to raise him unable to tell the difference between right and wrong. It sets the scene for a potentially exciting courtroom drama, so the play naturally chooses to... skip that part entirely.

Instead the rest of the first act deals with the wider fallout from the case, in what is probably meant to be a sweeping overview but actually ends up feeling like Sandberg pulled the topic for each scene out of a hat at random. At best it's almost gloriously incoherent, but even this is gone by the second act, a single long scene in which, 20-odd years later, an adult Dylan now played by Young is living off his earlier notoriety by starring in a reality show with his girlfriend (Wallis Currie-Wood - an American woman called Wallis moving to the UK, and it turning about as well as the last time that happened.) Schnapp now plays his own son Todd, essentially getting two cameo roles in a show sold entirely on his name.

The play's climax, a term I am here using inaccurately, is a bizarre case of the point it's trying to make being painfully obvious, while simultaneously failing entirely to convince that point - the parallels with the first act - make any sense.

Affluenza feels like an experiment in how many different ways you can sabotage a single script: What is probably aiming for realism in the dialogue invariably lands on the banal, the clumsy humour gets stony silence, except for one attempt at black comedy that completely misses the point that you're supposed to put some wit in there somewhere, so it just ends up as a deeply unpleasant non-sequitur*.

At times the straw man arguments Sandberg makes also wind up feeling offensive, like a lawyer (Janette Manrara) earnestly informing us that the US media will only care about a black or Hispanic victim, not a young white girl. As director Sandberg can't or won't do anything to salvage his own script, delivering a series of flat, lifeless scenes for all the human drama that's supposedly going on in them. The play starts and ends with a car crash, which is at least honest commentary on what happens in between.

Affluenza by Andy Sandberg is booking until the 28th of November at Riverside Studio 2.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Danny Kaan.

*"It's my sister, she's got cancer. It's OK, I don't like her."