Ice cream and Hot Fudge, at Voltaire. Much as been scribbled about the differences between Britain and the United States, two nations divided, as G.B. Shaw once said, by a common language. But few have painted such a clear-eyed portrait of the darker sides of our respective national psyches as British playwright Caryl Churchill in her seriocomic Ice Cream. In scene after scene she punctures the idealized views Americans have of the British and vice versa. In the first act a pair of doltish American tourists, searching for their roots in the UK, find a violent country ridden by poverty and despair, utterly unlike the charming Masterpiece Theatre world they’d expected. In the second act a hardened young British woman flees to America only to find a place as filled with ignorance and vice as lower-class London.
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–Jack Helbig
