PRETEND YOU HAVE BIG BUILDINGS. To 4 August.
Manchester.
PRETEND YOU HAVE BIG BUILDINGS
by Ben Musgrave.
Royal Exchange Theatre To 4 August 2007.
Mon-Fri 7.30pm Sat 8pm Mat Wed 2.30pm & Sat 4pm.
Runs 2hr 20min One interval.
TICKETS: 0161 833 9833.
www.royalexchange.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23 July.
Bruntwood Playwriting Competition winner in well-played production is an aptly awkward customer.
Nothing quite fits. Rukhsana and her son Danny fly in to a London where his dead father came from. Only it’s not London, but Romford, uneasily situated on the capital’s eastern edge, simultaneously in and out of London.
Annie welcomes them to their home, has bought a few things in, but isn’t really welcoming. There’s local racial prejudice. But hostile young Steven produces a capacity to be friendly while still defensive in his snatched phrasing. His friend Leon fights Danny, unwillingly. He actually likes him, taking him home, where Leon dresses in his mother’s clothes and cosmetics.
Rob, Leon’s dad, doesn’t like that; his shock at seeing Danny in his house could be because the lad’s dark-skinned or because he’s not the girlfriend he’d thought his son was meeting.
Rob’s uncertain how to side in the industrial dispute where he works; a Thatcherite to his consuming soul he still feels solidarity in hard times (this is recession-bitten 1995). But his wife Karen wants him to grab the redundancy money. She’s transfixed on her own boss, but knows he’ll never leave his family south of the river.
Perhaps it’s right such an uneasy play should have two directors, and that its designer should sometimes divide two rooms by a central street, at others unite the stage under a structure looking like an inverted Canary Wharf, but turning out to represent the gleaming new City’s contrast: Romford’s once-sensational Dolphin swimming-pool, shut for lack of council funds.
There’s similar uneasiness to the writing. Despite the airborne opening, it never flies. Short scenes, tensions between characters, terse language make it like a jigsaw puzzle where parts don’t easily fit.
Especially in the longer first act. Elements fuse more in the second, though the end seems a difficulty for the playwright; this production ends on a theatrical image rather than with a concluding dramatic moment.
Yet Ben Musgrave gives a vivid sense, in flashes of lightning, of the difficulty of forming relationships in youth or holding onto them in adulthood, in a world which, like the stage itself, is forever changing in what it represents.
Danny: Sacha Dhawan.
Ruhksana: Shobna Gulati.
Rob: Steve North.
Leon: Jonathan Bailey.
Annie: Susan Twist.
Karen: Tanya Franks.
Steven: Billy Seymour.
Dir4ectors: Jo Combes/Sarah Frankcom.
Designer: Jaimie Todd.
Lighting: David Holmes.
Sound: Gerry Marsden.
Movement: Dan O’Neill.
Dialects: Jan Haydn Rowles.
2007-07-26 14:50:56