DOG BOY. To 19 June.

Manchester

DOG BOY
by Amanda Dalton

Royal Exchange Studio To 19 June 2004
Fri 7pm Satr 1.30pm & 8pm Also weekday schools performances
Runs 1hr No interval
TICKETS: 0161 833 9833
www.royalexchange.co,uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 5 June

New play explores dark places with some success.Amanda Dalton's new play for 9+ descends into the depths with an underworld excursion into a mysterious laboratory for dead animals. It's a place young Dan visits thanks to meeting the very individual Bendy. A swift mover, and talker, unreflectively contrasting Dan, she has the animal-like ability to enter houses via a cat-flap - which is how she's got into Dan's.

Or rather, Dan's Gran's. For Dan lives with Gran, who relates to young people via frozen pizzas and the microwave. A life that might well make even the initially aggressive Bendy, with her special educational needs, seem an attractive lifestyle alternative.

So loss and death are central to this play - including the dog Dan loved and which leads Bendy to call him by the play's title name. It's a sense increased by having Dan's future self, in late middle-age, introduce and frame events.

That makes for an equal split between young and older generations on stage, though it's true the young pair have most of the playing-time. It adds to the darkness the piece explores.

Neither the characters - hard though Rachel Brogan works on Bendy - nor the story have the strength or sense of inevitability to make Dog Boy the potential classic of young people's work on death and bereavement that, for example, Brendan Murray's How High Is Up? constitutes for younger audiences.

That still leaves space for it to be a thoughtful, involving piece, worth an hour of young people's time. As it is.

Bendy: Rachel Brogan
Dan: Nick Figgis
Dan/Professor: Malcolm Raeburn
Gran: Romy Baskerville

Dirtector: Jacob Murray
Designer: Luke Hunt
Lighting: Richard Owen
Sound: Gerry Marsden
Choreographer: Shobna Gulati

2004-06-07 18:17:22