FRANK PIG SAYS HELLO. To 14 September.

London

FRANK PIG SAYS HELLO
by Patrick McCabe

Penny Dreadful Productions at the Finborough Theatre To 14 September 2002
Tue-Sat 8.30pm Sun 4.30pm
Runs 1hr 45min One interval

TICKETS 020 7373 3842
Review Timothy Ramsden 25 August

Spirited revival of a piece that successfully gets inside a strange head while giving a sense of the community round about in 1950s Ireland.Frances Brady was a one. Frank Pig indeed, and no wonder snorting away as he did. It's a surprise the boy didn't need new nostrils every few years, the use he put them to.

Sugary bread, his mother fed him on. When she wasn't trying to put a noose round her neck. So she was forever being carted off to the 'garage' – for repairs, as they used to tell young Frank in their kindness.

Young Frank knew what was what. Even if the world he knew was almost all his own making.

He could be a torment, to that bookish Philip Nugent – and his mother, saying they had to pay him a special tax. But it seemed sensible to Frank – certainly, the way wrinkled-nose Philip weakly played along would give no clue otherwise.

And you have to feel for Frank, carrying on when his father goes. And bicycling (if he did take the bicycle from the man who owned it) to see his blood-brother Joe in his new school, only to find him and Philip best friends.

For the world had grown up, and Frank was never going to be the one to see it. But it's the trick of the writing, plus the energy and understanding in this revival, that you're in no doubt how Frank saw the world - and how the world saw Frank.

Thomas Power's young Frank, intense and honest in stare and voice, makes each thought clear. Looking back on himself Wayne Leonard also slips effortlessly into the bookish Philip, the man on a bicycle and Maguire, the butcher whose test of Frank's power to stand the sight of pig's blood has unforeseen consequences.

Then there's Madeleine Moore, breezing in and out as an efficient Nurse, the slapdash mother for whom tea and hanging are both in a day's living, the prim Mrs Nugent and a town gossip.

The whole show's a moving, comic, terrifying parade, expertly directed, its realism never cluttered by the vivid images – old and young Frank in an undersized bed, the chain-smoking, chain-gossiping locals, cushions representing slaughtered pigs. As Mr Joxer Daly might say, it's a darlin' show.

Frank Pig: Wayne Leonard
Piglet: Thomas Power
Nurse: Madeleine Moore

Director: Caitriona McLaughlin
Lighting: Alex Watson
Sound: Darren Murphy

"Frank Pig Says Hello" is preceded nightly at the Finborough, on a separate ticket, by performances of LL's play "Falkland Sound".

2002-08-27 01:38:00