Lloyd Evans
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We first meet their little sister Maura at a dance hall where she’s being chatted up by a handsome young charmer, Terry. He and Maura become lovers. They set up home together. Maura gets pregnant. A wedding seems likely. But there’s a snag. Terry is a police officer. The relationship is doomed. Pressured by her family, Maura ends the affair and she allows her mum to persuade her to abort the pregnancy, too. The kitchen-table operation goes wrong and Maura is rushed to hospital on the brink of death. Saved by emergency surgery, she learns that she will never be able to have a family. But far from diminishing her, this calamity hardens her and sets her on a new path. She forms an alliance with Michael and they embark on a ruthless campaign to put their rivals out of business. Several killings later, they assume control of London’s criminal underworld.
These swift transitions sound wildly improbable but Maura’s development from innocent virgin, to abused plaything, to cold-eyed psycho is done with complete psychological accuracy. Here is a character with the exalted and damaged nature of an epic hero. The loss of her unborn child runs like a bloody thread through the story. Her elder brothers are picked off by jealous gunmen in a series of kidnappings and murders. These blows fall hardest on her mum while Maura herself remains unmoved. Her indifference is a species of revenge on the mother for forcing her to abort her child. This is the sort of terrain that a traditional bang-bang thriller written by a man would never dream of entering.
The second act becomes Wagnerian in scale. The Ryans expand their network to take in drug dealers, corrupt Tory politicians, Kalashnikov-toting terrorists and twitchy dukes in Pall Mall clubs. A huge gold-bullion heist at Heathrow goes wrong when a police helicopter is brought down by a burst of machinegun fire. Is this a bit silly? Well, yes, a bit. Yet it’s still gripping and credible because Cole holds fast to the imperatives of her characters and their relationships. Her moral is that violence is futile and self-destructive. And yet she still finds room to throw in a surprise twist that finishes the evening on a note of frivolity and celebration.
The show easily overcomes the crudities of the staging. Jean Marc Puissant’s set is a lumpish assembly of unwashed surfaces and scuffed old boards. And he seems to have spent the entire design budget making bids of 5p for various things on eBay. Total investment, roughly £2.80, I’d say. A dance hall is represented by a single spotlight and a horizontal piece of wood. Terry’s flat is suggested by a mattress and a pillow. The Ryans’ swish West End club is furnished with a table and two chairs. And Michael spends three decades as London’s leading criminal wearing the same suit.
Some of the acting has the same rough-hewn quality. James Clyde, as Michael, occasionally speaks as if he’s auditioning for Only Fools and Horses but his good looks and his animal presence are convincing enough. Veronica Quilligan does a great job as the indomitable old boot Sarah Ryan, although it’s a pity the eBay budget couldn’t stretch to an extra hairpiece for her. In a flashback scene she gives birth to Maura wearing a wig as white as a judge’s. Maura is played by Claire-Louise Cordwell, who has an excellent sense of comedy and she gives her developing character exactly the right sort of complexity and depth.
This is a superb night’s entertainment. And though the show is about the underclass it remains gloriously free of preachiness or any attempt to guide the audience towards a moral destination. All it does is take a tremendous story and tell it in tremendous style. And that’s plenty.
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