PAINTING BY NUMBERS. To 20 September.

London.

PAINTING BY NUMBERS
by Simon Mawdsley.

Old Red Lion 418 St John Street EC1V 4NJ To 20 September 2008.
Tue-Sat 7.30pm.
Runs 1hr 50min One interval.

TICKETS: 20 7837 7816.
www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 14 September.

Laughs, and cries of despair, from Her Majesty’s pleasure.
If it’s not pitmen, it’s prisoners. Everybody wants to have ago at art on stage these days, and if Simon Mawdsley’s rather formulaic piece about four prisoners forming their own arts class when the promised lecturer doesn’t turn up to teach them hasn’t the scope of Lee Hall’s history of Tyneside workers taking up the brush – well, it never claimed to have, and Mawdsley’s spells teaching writing in prisons ensures a sense of reality in character relationships.

There’s hard-man Webby, who rules the roost and gets the ultimate blame, drugs-dealing, hot-tempered Ray and slow Dermot, nicknamed Doormat as the illiterate one anyone can step on. Yet he’s impelled by a sense of responsibility towards his family, while newcomer Alan, for all his education, goes under as Doormat never did.

Skilfully, as never a stroke of anyone’s painting is actually seen, each prisoner’s painting takes its tone from its creator’s character: Ray’s sexually explicit, Doormat’s plain rubbish, while Webby struggles with his sense of inadequacy and Alan goes for modernist abstraction. Comedy and character tension co-exist as the art, and the play, take shape.

In the end, the cons are conned twice – once by a fellow inmate, more seriously by a scheming guard. And the least assertive inmate makes the biggest splash. This seems fitting enough as the prisoners’ anger and vulnerability are progressively revealed, the first quite plainly, the latter in briefer glimpses.

By contrast to this quartet’s colourful individuality, a chorus of guards, and the men’s nemesis, warder Negus, are presented with faces half-hidden under caps, speaking in brief phrases as a depersonalised chorus or a forbiddingly shadowy presence behind the men’s shoulders – though Mawdsley’s programme note, unlike his play, suggests prison staff generally support arts activities.

But the frustration, statue-dynamics and tedium of prison life are neatly expressed in the author’s production by Steve Osborne’s gravel-voiced alpha inmate, Mark Rose’s cunning yet volatile Ray, Matthew Juke, who shows Doormat’s distressed, slow-grinding brain leading, with ironic logic, to action, and Ian Attfield’s Alan, showing how easily the shock of imprisonment can slide someone into the misery of drugs dependency.

Webby: Steve Osborne.
Alan: Ian Attfield.
Ray: Mark Rose.
Doormat: Matthew Juke.

Director: Simon Mawdsley.
Designer: Brett Stevens.
Lighting: Mike Penketh.

2008-09-18 16:44:30