Teaching a delicate boy to be feral
AFTER a run of stinkers the Royal Court has come up with something undeniably engrossing, even if its pessimistic conclusion left me unpersuaded.
A single mother, 40- something, has died in northern England. She has left a sensitive teenage son, Liam. He has nowhere to go but to Rick, the rough-mannered Welsh father he has never known. Rick lives with a slapper called Suze (Siwan Morris).
Liam is a Doctor Who nerd and the play opens jauntily with him in Time Lordish bowtie and fez having returned from a Doctor Who convention with a pretty school friend, Jen (Morfydd Clark).
Liam fancies Jen but she seems to be already taken. The first half of this skilfully colloquial play has several moments of lippy comedy.
Wonkish Liam (David Moorst, excellent) is so different from the other boys roundabouts that Jen says he might as well have landed in ‘a blue box from another planet’.
He sounds different and is so much more bookish. He is certainly a world apart from his boozy, chauvinist father (Jason Hughes, entirely believable), Jen reckons.
Jen is used to boys who make a play for her affections. If Liam is to have any hope of winning her, he should perhaps take lessons from his old man in how to chat up a woman.
Up to a point, his savvy tactics work. Beyond that point, well, there is the rub of his play: we have a variant on the Pygmalion story. Is it wise to teach a delicate A-level pupil more feral ways?
Hamish Pirie’s in-the-round staging allows us to be close to the action without ever feeling intimidated. Is there a sense that, in Rick, playwright Gary Owen is showing his middleclass audience the behaviours of an almost alien species?
Jen is an implausible mix of streetwise and prim and Miss Clark may be at least five years too old to play a schoolgirl.
I did not buy the bleakness of what we might call the rapistgene storyline but the artistry of the performances and the panache of Mr Owen’s dialogue are entirely admirable.