FANNY AND FAGGOT. To 17 February.
London
FANNY AND FAGGOT
by Jack Thorne
Finborough Theatre Finborough Pub 118 Finborough Road SW10 9ED To 17 February 2007
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Sun 3.30pm
Runs 1hr 30min One interval
TICKETS: 0870 4000 838
www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 4 February
Enigmatic but intriguing delve into dark depths of humanity.
The case of Mary Bell shocked Britain in 1968. Gitta Sereny’s book about her still aroused fury 30 years later, bookshops in Newcastle-upon-Tyne refusing to display it. Aged 11, Mary had killed 2 younger boys. In self-defence she claimed, according to Jack Thorne’s double-bill; “They would have believed me, but it happened twice.”
Tending, as in the excellent When You Cure Me, to spare dialogue and narrative detail, Thorne tests comprehension of what’s happened, let alone exactly why. Mary and her friend Norma, 2 years older but found Not Guilty, double as the anonymous One and Two.
As numerical figures, they speak suvvern, while as the Bells their accents move north. The seeds of the crimes that emerged on Tyneside might have germinated anywhere. Less probably, the girls become judicial figures with a verbal accuracy suggesting remarkable memories for language and syntax unlikely to be natural to them.
Scrawlings on Georgia Lowe’s set vigorously express the children’s Fanny and Faggot defiance: aggression that’s a game to them. Thorne suggests Mary’s rough life: mother’s a prostitute, and Mary’s provocative intimacy with audience members at moments suggests she saw and learned (Norma, seems to have had fewer social disadvantages). But the games-playing never solves the conundrum of evil and innocence.
What the double-bill does markedly capture is the difference between childhood and the adult mind. A decade on, escaped from detention for a weekend in Blackpool with another female-inmate, Mary’s joking with a couple of pick-up squaddies in a cheap rented room. But behind the matiness with her friend Lucy and the ability to joke about her violent past, Mary remains an outsider. The dreamy girl wrapped up in her own mind becomes the young woman searching for an unobtainable normality.
Stephen Keyworth’s production contrives one of the most sudden entries in modern theatre, but works mainly by encouraging sympathetic, vivid performances. Simon Darwen gives the innocent Ray vivid credibility, while Diana May’s Lucy has a take-or-leave it casualness that’s pleasantly superficial. Elicia Daly beautifully contrasts child Mary’s abstraction and young woman Mary’s awareness that she’ll never quite make it to normal.
Part One: Two Little Boys
One/Norma Bell: Sophie Fletcher
Two/Mary Bell: Elicia Daly
Part Two: Superstar
Lucy: Diana May
Two/Mary Bell: Elicia Daly
Steve: Christopher Daley
Ray: Simon Darwen
Director: Stephen Keyworth
Designer: Georgia Lowe
Lighting: Tom Richmond
Sound: Dominic Thurgood
2007-02-08 00:34:36