Bittersweet tales of strife in the Eighties
Road Royal Court, London
Is decent new writing about Austerity Britain undergoing its own austerity crisis? What else to make of the Royal Court’s unusual decision to revive one of its own plays from 1986 – Jim Cartwright’s scorching portrait of a working-class town at the height of Thatcherism? Must we assume there are scant new plays offering a more contemporary window on these economically unequal times?
Whatever. It’s hard to argue this revival makes no sense. Cartwright is better known as the author of Little
Voice, the play and then film about a cripplingly shy young singer that made a star of Jane Horrocks. But this earlier play, a jagged, achingly lyrical drama that telescopes in on the residents of a recession-blasted Lancashire street over one raucous, ordinary night, has its own historic pedigree: its original production was staged at the Court as a promenade – quite revolutionary back then – and starred the Blockheads’ frontman Ian Dury as Scullery, the storyteller.
John Tiffany, magician director of the West End smash hit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, has set the play’s abstract, freewheeling rhythms loose. There’s precious little physical sense of a community. There’s no set at all, in fact, save for a few street lamps with their sodium light bathing the brick walls at the back of the stage, and a large glass box that rises from the centre at will. There is an explicit acknowledgement of the role of the audience – generally a well-heeled lot at the Royal Court – as voyeurs peering in on a forsaken corner of England. The box, from which individual characters frequently deliver monologues, serves as both prison and Petri dish.
Cartwright’s characters – be they unemployed, on the razz, trapped at home or out prowling for sex – have lost none of their fire. There’s Brenda (in one of several outstanding turns from Michelle Fairley), a withered alcoholic in a grey tracksuit, reduced to begging her daughter for money. There’s Jerry (Mark Hadfield, excellent), a lonely gay man tortured by his memories of a long lost love. There’s Valerie, forced to “sniffle out” money like a “bony rat” because her husband spends the giro down the pub. There’s tottering Doreen and Lane – trussed up like birds in fluorescent orange and turquoise feathers. And through them all wanders Lemn Sissay’s thieving, slippery Scullery – a puck of the gutter who is both a vital force in this night of chaos, and its witness.
What saves this sometimes gruelling play from becoming a full-on misery fest is the astonishing, muscular vitality of Cartwright’s writing. His unholy, poetic vernacular lends a visceral nobility to his characters’ yearning for something beyond themselves. These are people who know in their marrow they are both abandoned and trapped.
“Everybody’s poor and sickly white,” says Joey’s girlfriend Clare. “I’m like I am because of you and you’re like you are because of who knows what rot,” says Brenda’s daughter Carol. Tiffany harnesses every ounce of the play’s verbal energy. Music geeks will have fun trying to identify the soundtrack’s relatively obscure Eighties songs. In one of the funniest scenes, Helen (Fairley again) tries to seduce a soldier who has reached catatonic levels of drunkenness. There are many moments of wild, cartwheeling beauty. Sissay’s Scullery dances a duet with a shopping trolley to the swelling strains of Swan Lake. In the closing scene, four boozed-up teenagers listen in silence to Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness.
It’s a hard, occasionally transcendent evening and also, surely, a gauntlet to modern playwrights.