It's always the quiet ones who surprise you.

There they were in deepest Suffolk. A largely middle-class, middle-brow and middle-aged audience. The Tannoy cut in. "The play you are about to see contains explicit language and scenes which some may find offensive."

At least, Mark Ravenhill's previous work had worn its heart on its sleeve. The title was so explicit that part of it had to be asterisked out on the poster. Shopping and F***ing. You knew where you stood with that.

The title of this new production was more insidious altogether. Some Explicit Polaroids. What did that mean?

The actors awaited their cue backstage at the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds. Would the crowd be appalled? Would they walk out, or worse, riot?

Not a bit of it. "I was surprised at just how well they took to it and engaged with it," says David Sibley, one of its stars.

"It is confrontational and it is still possible that people will be offended. But it's also an extremely funny play, and that's what the audience in Suffolk recognised."

Mark Ravenhill is the enfant terrible of British theatre just now. The intensely controversial Shopping and F***ing broke new ground not only in its extreme profanity but also in its treatment of drugs as essential recreational material among the young.

Some Explicit Polaroids, his newest play, which arrives in Yorkshire next month en route from London and Bury St Edmunds, strikes a slightly mellower tone.

Its anti-hero is Nick, a far-left radical who emerges from 15 years in prison to discover that the passion has gone out of politics. The angry marches and demonstrations of the early Thatcher years have been replaced by apathy and spin.

Nick was sent down for an unspecified crime against a wealthy asset-stripper, who now wishes to affect what the Americans call a closure: an end to 'unfinished business'. The air is thick with anticipated violence as the two meet.

"It's pretty strong, but the structure is very different to that of Shopping and F***ing," says Sibley, who plays Jonathan the asset stripper.

"Having said that, Mark writes about young people, and the young person's voice is still very strong here. He writes about the alienation that that generation feels very strongly."

Ravenhill surprised some critics, and was even labelled a reactionary, for having one of his characters espouse a convincing case for capitalism. But as with his previous work, Some Explicit Polaroids provides no answers, only questions.

For Sibley, the production is in stark contrast to the role in which he was most recently seen: as a slapstick foil to Rik Mayall and Arian Edmondson in the cultish knockabout film, Guest House Paradiso.

"The set was an obstacle course," he says. "But fortunately, the nasty stuff all happens to Rik and Ade, not me."

Sibley is also familiar as Mr Spooner the banker in the BBC's Middlemarch. "He was the one who lent money and then got it back by walking into people's houses and selling their furniture," he says.

"But more than anything, I love new plays. And Polaroids has been particularly exciting because we developed so much of it in rehearsal.

"Mark Ravenhill had two, quite different, drafts of the play and he took bits from each. It grew over the five or six week period of rehearsal."

His own character has its roots in a number of real financiers of dubious repute.

Robert Maxwell?

"Oh, no," says Sibley. "Jonathan's far shadier than that."

SOME EXPLICIT POLAROIDS is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse from February 15-19. Tickets are bookable on 0113 213 7700.

David Behrens

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