FALLOUT till 19 July

London

FALLOUT
by Roy Williams

Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs To 19 July 2003 Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3.30pm
Runs 1hr 55min No interval

TICKETS: 020 7565 5000
www.royalcourttheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 30 June

Front-line report: fears and smiles from the urban battle-ground with unsentimental sympathy.
Nearly 50 years after the English Stage Company and its Sloane Square home rocketed to fame with Look Back in Anger, a play expressing the discontents of English youth, its latest premiere's doing the same. But what a different youth. In place of Sunday broadsheets and bishops, denounced in word-flood speeches, there's a non-white estate-ghetto society (only adult authority people are white here) and expressing itself with a terseness to make text-messaging seem expansive rhetoric.

A studious youth killed in the street, a police investigation netting an unreliable girl witness. As it proceeds, with a white police officer's self-taught ethnic sympathy frictioning against his black colleague's intolerance of tow-rags everywhere, the question isn't who but why.

Ultz's set, built over the Stalls, creates an urban anonymity, interiors marked out simply by a couple of red plastic chairs. The space is a corridor, sided by wire-mesh panels against which bodies crash. It's a passage without a defined end, where gangs roam and no-one is safe. Hostile territory. Girls rob a former teacher, the brilliant student Kwame is murdered, and there's room for many a motive. The one finally unearthed is, of course, a misreading of the truth.

There's an extremely subversive moment, when the unPC PC puts down a youth with a smart reply. A Royal Court audience siding with laughter against disaffected youth even if the constable is Black it's a sign of changing times.

Writing of this world (a few miles from West End foyers, vast distances from its usual stage traffic) with the freedom of a writer who's Black, Roy Williams doesn't preach, but creates living characters. The mark-out is between those with the mental resources to think individually and stand up for their convictions, and those who look to the group for status and decisions. And pack-leader Dwayne (whose drunk and indigent father shows why the street's become his son's territory) has nowhere to look for help.

It could be a reactionary's dream without Williams' understanding, which an ace cast brings to life, with Ian Rickson's meticulous, unobtrusive direction. Performances never feel constrained; the production seamlessly latches an advancing plot with new insights into its characters.

Clinton: Jason Frederick
Dwayne: Michael Obiora
Emile: Marcel McCalla
Perry: O-T Fagbenie
Joe: Lennie James
Matt: Daniel Ryan
Shanice: Ony Uhiara
Ronnie: Petra Letang
Manny: Clive Wedderburn
Miss Douglas/Defence Lawyer: Lorraine Brunning

Director: Ian Rickson
Designer: Ultz
Lighting: Nigel J Edwards
Sound: Ian Dickinson
Music: Stepthen Warbeck
Fight director: Terry King
Company voice work: Patsy Rodenburg
Assistant director: Natalie Abrahami

2003-07-08 21:44:26