Shopping Centre by Matthew Osborn

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Is there something inherently less authentic about the nutter who occupies the basement of an artificial street than the bum on a real one? Matthew Osborn’s new play Shopping Centre certainly creates an unfamiliar nutter: a part shell-suited geezer whose penchant for leather sofas, letter openers and the smoothness of David Cameron’s face is a little too off-the-wall to wholly convince. 

Following last year's successful suburban comedy Cul-de-Sac, standup and playwright Osborn's latest Fringe show is awash with surreal ideas. He plays Jim, a man wholly emasculated by objects. Sexually ousted by his wife for a dildo, Jim relocates to a bunker 100 metres below his favourite shopping centre to fetishise its goods full time. Sniffing his fingers with relish at the memory of stroking a leather three-piece suite, Jim sighs: “Like being cuddled by a naked girl.” 

Not quite a comedy given its unrelenting bleakness, Shopping Centre is a monologue Jim delivers to the unconscious body of a security guard he’s rescued from a sale-sparked riot upstairs. Though loosely based on real events, the credibility of this riot is dubious. Jim’s tale of middle-aged couples smashing gravy boats and dinner services is barely believable.

Jim possesses an intermittently arresting strangeness and his David Cameron sex fantasies raise titters. But the impressively pathetic call to arms in defence of the mall might be the only time Osborn strikes the Ballardian notes he’s aiming for in the play’s genuinely rattling finale.