JACK PLEASURE. To 15 February.
London
JACK PLEASURE
by Adrian Berry with the music of Barry Adamson
Union Theatre To 15 February 2003
Tue-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 1hr 15min No interval
Unhappy family or fantasy future: there's a welcome sympathy with all the characters here.'Waving lags changes nothing,' 37 year old Terry tells Bill, his should-be retired but still militant father. While Bill's organising protest action to keep the local bike factory open, Terry's out to change his own life by upping himself and suitcase to become a male porn-stud. Just like that.
And, as Adrian Berry's play shows convincingly, if predictably, enough life just isn't like that. It's a piece that dwindles, deliberately, from opening razzamatazz - unreal lighting, fantasy strip-sequence and trick scene-change (two red-lit female figures swaying on to the stage turn out to be members of Terry's ultra-respectable family), to end as a straightforwardly traditional northern tale of semi-detached discontent.
For Terry's an aging Billy Liar, someone whose internal discontents come from the grinding of a not especially developed inner discontent (fair enough, plenty of ordinary folk feel fed up as the last decade that can pretend to youth proceeds towards its end) against job and family.
Terry's intended reinvention as Jack Pleasure gives an edge of absurdity, particularly when he's surrounded by the solid sense of auntie Brenda and his loving wife Susan. She puts up with more than she should from the husband who can't love her, just as dad and Brenda believe they'd have been better for each other than Bill found the wife who left years ago for wherever.
Everyone tying themselves in unsuitable emotion, or emotion-free, relationships, is frequent enough in drama, as it is in novels. But Berry has a decent line in humour: it's seen, for example, in Terry's increasingly fantasy monologues to the coach passengers he drives in a life that goes the distances but ends up nowhere new. Terry's denunciations of all around have a force that carries us in drama, but Berry ensures we don't lose sight of the world's need for its quota of Brendas: the sort of people who can like Craythorpe, where the houses are cheap and the shops are good, and get on with their lives.
And the father/son relationship, while handled too lightly at times - Bill as a character has more potential than Berry, as writer or director, allows - catches the late 20th century's retreat from political and local involvement. Coming to adulthood in the Thatcher years, Terry's response is to get on a plane and look for self-fulfilment elsewhere; dad, a mid-century mind, is all for banners and giving it a communal go.
We don't learn what happens to the bike-makers, but there's little expectation of Terry either. Four reliable performances catch both the quirkily humorous aspects of the script and, with the women, the vaue of a realistic view of life. In particularly, Lucy Ward as Susan makes sense of someone stoically seeking to repair a relationship and find a realisable contentment.
Brenda: Lynne Austin
Susan:Lucy Ward
Terry: Andy Fox
Bill: Colin Hill
Woman: Sarah Reed
Director: Adrian Berry
Designer/Costume: Michelle Forster
Lighting: Martin Hutchings
Choreographer: Lizzie Wort
2003-02-02 17:10:45