Altruism is a funny thing.  People’s motives for taking up this or that cause vary, from the truly heartfelt desire to right a perceived injustice, to revelling in being seen in a protest line whatever the ’cause’.  The latter is true of the altruists in American writer Nicky Silver’s play, they’re a pack of selfish, self-obsessed, sex-obsessed losers.

The only likeable and genuine person on stage is Lance (Leon Wadham) a male prostitute who is courted by one of his clients, Ronald (Gareth Ruck).  Vulnerable and isolated, Lance is in a nest of vipers but doesn’t see it.  Ronald actually is a (fairly) decent chap and they could well have a loving relationship, if only they were left alone.

Those vipers include TV soap actress Sydney (Mel Dodge) who loves bad boy Ethan (Ben Fransham) despite the fact he lies, cheats and steals.  One morning she’s pushed too far and her actions have consequences for all around her.  One of those is lesbian (or is she?) Cybill (Desiree-Rose Cheer) who like Sydney feels trapped in a relationship with a controlling partner. 

The play is satirical – about altruism, contemporary society, love, relationships, about the way people are happy to take a stand on public issues while failing to address the injustices they inflict on others.

The script is densely written, often extremely funny, and is performed in top gear under the direction of Gene Alexander.  He and his terrific cast are physically restricted by three unnecessarily large beds dominating the small Bats stage, which is a pity, though it does create a sense of claustrophobia, being stuck in a tiny space with these ghastly people.

That’s the play’s real weakness, the fact they are ghastly and unsympathetic, and after an hour and 50 minutes in their company you want to go home and have a shower.

But it’s also a sharp piece of writing done full justice by the cast and director. 

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After watching President Obama’s inauguration in the morning with all its attendant pomp, euphoria and overwhelming sense of communal optimism, it was odd to see in the evening a satirical American play, written in 2000, that skewers in a ham-fisted way left-wing activists as being nothing more than self-serving hypocrites.

Though there is precious little to laugh at in Gene Alexander’s production or the play for that matter, The Altruists is a dark comedy about three professional protesters who will protest at anything that’s going whether it be whales, gays, the police, a war, or cutbacks in education and the arts.

One of the best gags is when Cybil, a lesbian with doubts about her sexuality since she has met the promiscuous Ethan, has to be reminded that it is no longer necessary to protest against Mandela’s imprisonment.

The characters are an unpleasant lot except possibly for Lance, the gay hustler that Ronald, a social worker, has picked up and fallen in love with. Maybe he’s a sympathetic character because we learn in the play’s only moving scene that he has not one friend in the world.

These professional left-wing protesters are all neurotic solipsists: Sydney, Ronald’s sister and an actress in a popular soap called Montana Beach, and her faithless lover Ethan, and Cybil and her unseen lover. They speak largely in lengthy monologues which are no doubt appropriate for solipsists but it is a fashion in playwrighting that needs to be abandoned for a while by just about everyone except Alan Bennett. 

The play takes place in three bedrooms, none of which in this over-long production bears any resemblance to a New York apartment that the characters might live in and the actors are unable to capture either the flamboyance or the neuroticism of their caricatures.

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The poster, flyer and programme for The Altruists by USA playwright Nicky Silver feature a child-art line-up of people history may claim as altruists: Lenin, the Pope, Che Guevara, Mother Theresa and Ghandi, in bodies and costumes or with props that contradict their popular image.   

A play that shattered the myths surrounding them would at least have had the virtue of giving itself somewhere to go. But we bring no preconceptions to Silver’s five claimants to the title: Sydney, a daytime soap opera ‘star’ who lets the others sponge on her; her wayward lover Ethan, a political activist; her gay social-worker brother Ronald; his latest ‘project’ Lance, a rent-boy; political activist and lapsed lesbian Cybill, into whatever demo is going if only she could remember what, why, where and when.

Each character announces themselves as the deeply superficial egotist they are and none deviates from that behaviour for the 90-minute duration of this extremely cynical portrait of a self-serving generation. Silver sacrifices the clear dramatic and comic potential of self-delusion, moral hypocrisy, exposure, revelation and cathartic change for a level of humour that would work well in revue sketches. But his play becomes repetitive when the plot fails to move much beyond the expository phase, to actually challenge or change anyone.

Certainly the characters seem to be having new and different experiences, except they just prove to be more of the same, and the petulant murder of the wrong person does create a major problem for them to solve. I can only suppose that Silver expects his audience to expect them to be catalysed by this event, and thus be surprised when the selfish gene proves indomitable.

His thesis appears to be that the so-called altruists of left-wing activism are just as motivated by self interest as any new-right market-forced monetarist. Fair enough. But his point would be better made in half the time. And even then, to elevate it from sketch to play, some level of humanitarian insight into their foibles and vulnerabilities would serve better than the loathing in which he strait-jackets his characters.

As it stands (and I have to be circumspect here) there is no valid set-up or psycho-emotional pay-off for us to empathise with in the final betrayal of lover by lover, supposedly for the greater good, that should provide the play with a gasp-inducing climax. Either director Gene Alexander and his dedicated team have failed to exhume crucial strains of subtext or there is none. I take the latter to be the case.

It is a thankless challenge, then, for the cast to hold us for the full performance and they rise to it well. It’s not their fault that their characters flatline in the grooves they have been consigned to when they should be riding peaks and troughs; that relative silence replaces the early bursts of laughter, because when it comes to delivering comedy of insight, hey, we’ve already got it.

They all delineate the limits of their characters clearly. Mel Dodge’s neurotic and emotionally dependent Sydney paces like a caged lioness as she compulsively verbalises her inner turmoil. Gareth Ruck’s compulsively idealistic social worker Ronald is tellingly addicted to romantic love and rampant gay sex.

Leon Wadham’s drug-dependent and compulsively air-drumming Lance times his gag moments nicely en route to proving how arid his life is. Ben Fransham exemplifies Ethan’s compulsive commitment to non-commitment in the name of freedom. Desiree-Rose Cheer sustains a manically compulsive Cybill as she tries to recover what’s lost in her addled brain and scattered life.

The Altruists is set in New York, by the way, and it’s interesting that the latter Framsham and Cheer play their characters as itinerant Kiwis, Cybill specifically hailing from Dannevirke. It works well without being obtrusive, and the others are equally at home with their American accents.

In a three-mattress setting, lit by Tamsin Dashfield, director Gene Alexander cracks the pace along, almost but not quite managing to paste over the play’s lack of substance. It’s a shame when such good committed work delivers so little substance.

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