A hustler stands by his pint and tells us about the tricks of his con, as if bragging to his mate in the pub. But Max turns out to be a newspaper hack. Despite this depiction of the sleazy, amoral and self-serving journalist who really might sell his granny for a story, this drama is ultimately about the dangers of eroding press freedoms.
A one-hour monologue, it is directed by Romola Garai and written by Sam Hoare, who plays Max, and is part of a season of double bills, paired with Tunnels. The deputy stage manager enters the stage intermittently to hand Max drinks but begins dismantling the set around him as the story takes darker turns.
Clearly having started out in the days before the Leveson inquiry, Max speaks of his dodgy news-gathering with no remorse – from running stories that portray innocent men as paedophiles to putting a salacious spin on the murder of a schoolgirl.
It is an engagingly told story, black in its comedy, but travels too close to cliche in its depiction of Max. This makes it all the harder to believe in his sudden turn towards principled investigative journalism when he begins to uncover evidence about the ill-treatment of asylum seekers and the quashing of protests in what appears to be a dystopian Britain, run as a police state.
All the same, the tension is built up well, and as Max talks of the “shadow people” – dark agents of the state – Suzanne Emerson’s evocative set design projects ominous silhouettes across the wall. Hoare is a fine and confident performer, too, who keeps us hooked, even if he does not fully convince us of Max’s Damascene conversion.
• This article was amended on 5 December 2022. It is the deputy stage manager, not director Romola Garai, who appears intermittently on stage during the performance.
