Affluenza review – Stranger Things star Noah Schnapp can’t save this baffling disaster

It starts off with a car crash, and enters its own pile-up before your eyes. There is some initial coherence, at least: Dylan, the son in a filthy rich family, played by Netflix star Noah Schnapp, has killed two people while drink-driving and injured several more. His parents, at their Hamptons home, are hashing out Dylan’s defence with a hotshot lawyer. They deny he did anything wrong – “people died, he didn’t kill them” – and throw money at the problem in hope it goes away. All the while, 16-year-old Dylan plays Nintendo upstairs.

An original legal defence is invoked, along the lines of the poor little rich boy, suffering from “affluenza”, a psychological malaise in which a crime becomes the fault of wealthy parents who have failed to teach their progeny right or wrong. It is an intriguing setup with some parallels to the hit-and-run case involving teenager Harry Dunn and Anne Sacoolas. Its moral dilemma is promising, its echoes of victim culture resonant.

So we are set to watch the court case play out in Andy Sandberg’s play but a minute later, it is reported to be over. Where to go from here? Under Sandberg’s direction, it screeches around a corner, on to the highway of the truly bizarre. The plot has moved on several decades after the interval. Dylan, now played by Rupert Young, who played the lawyer in the first half, is a middle-aged man and divorcee, while Schnapp now plays his 17-year-old son, Todd.

Dylan has repurposed his past for a reality TV show and what follows is a satire of the genre. A TV producer is choreographing the action, Todd doesn’t want any part of it, and a cameraman shooting the show has a breakout moment to lip-sync to Joan Osborne’s One of Us, apropos of nothing. Dry ice emanates from the wings. Is this smoke rising from the play’s mangled car engine?

Schnapp, star of hit show Stranger Things, faced some backlash for comments made soon after the 7 October Hamas attacks. The Israel-Palestine conflict is the least of his problems here. Both his characters are supporting parts, taking up so little oxygen on stage that you wonder why anyone would cast a big name and then tuck it away in two bit-parts?

Speaking of bit-parts, former Strictly Come Dancing pro dancer Janette Manrara is acting rather than foxtrotting here, but again plays a host of tiny roles, from the family’s Mexican cleaning lady to the woman who holds the mic on the set of the reality TV show. Who put Manrara in a corner? And who didn’t see the irony in delivering a tirade against reality TV in the presence of such reality TV royalty?

It is hard to decipher what we are watching here – comedy, drama or a theatrical car crash in slow motion. If it is the latter, it is the kind that JG Ballard’s voyeurs watch in Crash, with a mix of biliousness and grimy fascination. How did this epic wreckage occur? Why does it keep getting bigger? You want to look away, for shame, but simply can’t stop gawping.