BLAME. To 21 April.

London

BLAME
by Judith Jones and Beatrix Campbell

Arcola Theatre 27 Arcola Street E8 2DJ To 21 April 2007
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat 14, 21 April 3pm no performance 9 April
Post-show discussion 11, 18 April
Runs 1hr 50min One interval

TICKETS: 020 7503 1646
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 April

Blazingly performed picture of a near-feral society.
Sometimes you don’t want to leave the theatre after a play’s over. But rarely for this reason. Hackney and Dalston, that wait outside the Arcola, are presented in Sphinx Theatre Company (with York Theatre Royal)’s new play by Judith Johnson and Beatrix Campbell as an emotionally raw place of no safety for its inhabitants. They form an alternative society, not in the old, hopeful sense, but one of intense personal deprivation.

These are people for whom life is a chaos; apart perhaps from Paula, a cleaner for whom the City office-blocks she helps keep gleaming down the road are another world. Fellow-cleaner Mandy gave her a chance despite her prison record. Behind Paula is a history of abuse, showing women with even less power than the men in this world.

Raymond too is getting his life back together, but he knows the limits for someone with a police record. At the centre is emotionally chaotic Mandy; her whirl of a birthday party never settles, her life entirely fixed on immediate needs. Her young daughter Laikeisha suffers most, and is already biting back, wanting a normal mother.

Mandy hasn’t learned the vocabulary of the powerless. A new front-door for her council-flat has to come from Poland. She keeps insisting she’s “entitled” and being reminded she’s merely “eligible”. Authority-figures never visit her world. They’re always a ‘phone-call or visit away, though she’s can’t see the need to keep inconvenient appointments.

Tearing angrily at someone or laid-out asleep, Lindsey Coulson’s compulsive, never-settled Mandy turns on anyone, including Dwayne who uses Laikeisha to deliver crack and Chantelle whose repeated protests she’s going to be a mother interest no-one. Till the interval Deborah Bruce’s production with its low, torn-ceiling design by Patrick Connellan, sudden surges of furniture-moving and snaps of Jo Dawson’s lighting between the brief scenes, plus a perpetual background of half-perceived sounds, highlights individuality and humanity without disguising the problems in these lives.

After the interval, and a central tragic event, the writers turn the characters more into mouthpieces for their own blaming of society. This is less powerful but thanks to the cast, particularly Coulson’s scorchingly irate Mandy, the piece still carries considerable strength.

Dwayne: Nicholas Beveney
Mandy: Lindsey Coulson
Raymond/Denny: Andrew Paul
Chantelle: Katie Wimpenny
Paula: Sandra Yew
Laikeisha: Callie Ward

Director: Deborah Bruce
Designer: Patrick Connellan
Lighting: Jo Dawson

2007-04-08 02:08:59