Lloyd Evans
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The setting is a London housing estate where various no-hopers are scrabbling around trying to escape the scrapheap. We meet Cannon, an ex-SAS mercenary, who returns from abroad to make friends with his children, Gary and Lou, whom he dumped in an orphanage after their mother’s death. Gary and Lou are in a right old pickle emotionally. Luscious Lou had to sell her body to survive the brutal care-home regime. Gormless Gary got shoved in a broom cupboard by bullies and had his arm snapped in two. Violence begets violence. Ditto low ambition. Gary is now a knife-waving thug whose sole aim in life is to purchase a large German automobile and cruise around London selling cocaine. All he’s got so far, unfortunately, is a tricycle and some cannabis leaves.
Gary makes sense as a character: a white kid enamoured of black culture. His best mate, Michael, is a jumble of illegible motifs. He’s a black teenage criminal with Home Counties aspirations. He’s brainy. He reads. He wears spectacles (underclass code for ‘genius’, apparently), and even though he deals crack he also plans to study psychology at Oxford. His sister Bernice is a better creation. A steely but likeable go-getter, she utterly detests her brother’s white-trash mates. (The fabulous Kanga Tankye-Buah, as Bernice, brings some welcome comic uplift to proceedings.)
Georgia Lowe’s design is a hymn to low-budget grubbiness. The set features an open sandwich of blistered plastic slabs which look like concrete with scurvy. The note of gloom never varies. So it’s just as well there’s no interval. The temptation to bung oneself under a bus on the Finborough Road might have proved overpowering.
This is harrowing, obstacle-course theatre. What does it mean? The title is an abbreviation of ‘F*** Off, Gary’, the nickname our hapless hero acquired in the care-home-stroke-torture-unit. Perversely, he insists on retaining this emblem of martyrdom into adulthood. The play’s wider message is that urban outcasts have hearts of gold and their warped brutality can be soothed by love, by education and by a job in Debenhams. Fair enough, but we’d guessed that.
The affluent west London audience at this pessimism fiesta treated it as a trip to the zoo. Guffaws of pitying hilarity erupted whenever some brain-dead vagrant expressed a longing for ‘a digital plasma telly’. The play is a decent debut. It needs a firmer plot line, more complete characters, and, above all, it needs fresh things to say about the underclass. Ten years ago these dope-den mash-ups were everywhere on the London stage. Public indifference terminated the genre, thank God. This return to the bear pit isn’t what anyone wants.
The same venue has welcomed a touring one-woman show. Rebecca Peyton’s monologue traces her response to her sister’s death in Somalia in February 2005. Peyton’s sister Kate was a senior BBC producer stationed in South Africa. Having been pressurised to cover one of the nastiest wars in living memory, she was suddenly and pointlessly murdered. The Beeb has attracted some stick over her death. Kate had already turned down two chances to visit Iraq and her bosses had discreetly threatened her with redundancy if she refused the Somali assignment. But what else could they do? If war correspondents tire of war zones they can always become knitting correspondents.
Rebecca Peyton’s piece is fascinating, moving and full of dark humour. Her original title, 101 Uses for your Murdered Sister, is a better description of her theme. To cope with Kate’s death, she adopted the macabre strategy of making capital from it whenever the occasion arose. ‘Can you let me back in? My sister’s just been murdered,’ she pleaded to a bouncer after being ejected from a nightclub for drunkenness. Curiously, Kate herself is an absentee. We learn little about her other than that she lived in a plush BBC house in Johannesburg complete with a swimming pool and flocks of black servants. The show’s only failing — and it’s a minor one — is that Rebecca focuses exclusively on the maelstrom of her own emotions without once mentioning, let alone analysing, the war that her sister died publicising.
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