FIERCE. To 4 June.

Tour

FIERCE
by Justin Young

Grid Iron theatre company Tour to 4 June 2004
Fierce will also play during the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Runs 1hr 35min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 1 June at Volunteer Hall, Galashiels

Lives up to its name: fearsome and high-energy.
Start at the end with this review - look at the credits; they give a good idea of style and content. This is theatre of the streets - the meanest sort. Thoroughfares where, if you'e not one of the hardmen, you'll likely get a thorough going over. It's tower-block land, as early projections show. A place where territory's marked out - and to some extent protected - by the metallic mesh that surrounds the stage.

Such territory has been marked out, too, by plentyof middle-class theatre over the decades. It's a strong street cred. area for writers and progressive theatre companies. Justin Young's script has the street-aggro language to fight with the strongest.

What gives the piece an edge is the intimacy it shows with spray-paint language, aerosol speak, and the production's high-energy pace. The pace and rhythm pulsing through much of the speech and action is often caught up in the energy of Philip Pinsky and Lophonics' music with its rhythmic and melodic hooks driving the fast-paced action.

It's all used to examine sensitivity in a tough world. Findlay, medicated to keep him from entering the depression-zone, is a talented comic-book artist who asserts himself against the dominant bullies and enforcers by becoming super-graffiti artist Fierce. Big Barry can't stomach such a challenge on 'his' streets; he uses Findlay's friend Wee Babz to reveal the identity of this new voice on the block.

Tommy Mullins turns in another of his close-allied smile and anger performances to cover over the script's blur in this character - a wavering between attraction and repulsion towards heavy crime that's more plot requirement than character exploration.

Things only quieten and slow a bit when Findlay's with either of the two women in his life - his mother and the friend he makes working at the supermarket checkout. (Findlay's mother's a generation above the other characters, and she's not yet 30.)

This is a world where women alone seem to have any constructive hope in life. Helen McAlpine and (back from the London Undergound to this Scots underworld) Cora Bissett give strong portrayals of emotional life reaching beyond the protective shells of male existence.

Apart from their presence, this is a fierce, dangerous world as emotionally 2-D and lurid as comic-book drawing or Fierce's graffiti - though friendships from the street help wean Findlay off his prescription drugs. It's an urgent, night-time, sometimes nightmarish world where survival's a full-time ocupation. That's often been shown on stage but, with its youth-awareness, Fierce makes it particularly vivid.

Pokey: Ross Allan
Finlay: Mark Arends
Annie: Cora Bissett
Chav Barry: Garry Collins
Choonz: Steven Cree
Wee Babz: Tommy Mullins
Edie: Helen McAlpine
Geri: Catherine Whitefield

Directors: Janie Abbott. Justin Young
Designer: Becky Minto
Sound/Composer: Philip Pinsky
Additional music/Arrangers/Music producers: Lophonics
Choreographer: Allan Irvine
Costume: Jessica Brettle
Projection: Fifty Nine Limited
Comic/Graffiti Projection illustrations: The 16K Design Works
Graffiti artist: Nico Major
Dramaturg: Zinnie Harris

2004-06-03 17:22:07