ROBBERS. To 29 May.

London

ROBBERS
by Lyle Kessler

Tristan Bates Theatre To 29 May 2004
Mon-Sat 7.30pm
Runs2hr 25min One interval

TICKETS: 020 7240 6283
Review: Timothy Ramsden 17 May

A fine find and skilful variant on old dramatic lines.US dramatist Lyle Kessler's best-known in Britain for Orphans, but this piece recalls Martin Scorsese's film After Hours, where a respectable business type finds himself floundering through a New York night in an under-society of which he had no knowledge. There's a similar disorientation here to the adventures of Ted, though he's from a far humbler setting in Flatbush, NY. Whatever the limitations of Brave New World Theatre Company's production at the Tristan Bates Theatre (inside the Actors Centre, Covent Garden), they've brought an intriguing and individual drama to British theatre.

Ted is delivery-man for his father's plaster models, but when someone dumps garbage outside the house, he discovers the world's full of less stable bodies. No-one's what they seem, including, soon, Ted who's undercover as Kenneth (before adding Jake and potentially Dennis to the list) finding out which of the workforce are fiddling the boss. It's a processed-food factory, so even the contents of the tin can't be trusted. People take on the ethnicity of their neighbourhood, the boss (a ferocious tour de force from Derek Howard) and daughter change religions like t-shirts, without ever losing his tooth-and-claw vindictive aggression or her predatory sexuality.

Moral criteria become as muddied as identities. Old dramatic conflicts between friendship or love and duty come into play. If no-one's what they seem, nothing ends up weighing what seemed likely in the first place. It's disorienting enough to make Ted a stranger to his father. And to force him into a new role in place of a lost identity.

The realistic studio staging demands some longish set-changes in a play with numerous short scenes. Playing hypes up to vitriol-level with surging ease. It's less happy in lower emotional keys, though the love-scene has enough compelling silence and sincerity to contrast its brusque dismissal by Ted's tec-agency boss, the garbage-distributing Feathers (a well-cultivated aura of enigma from Richard Heap). Will Thorp looks suitably lost as the innocent Candide figure at the centre of these metro-follies. A play well worth seeing.

Ted: Will Thorp
Cleo: Carla Du Bois
Pop: Vincent Pirillo
Feathers: Richard Heap
Lucinda: Denise Gough
The Owner: Derek Howard
Vinnie: Marco Rossi

Director: Spencer Hinton
Designer: Anna Toumanova
Lighting: Mark Dymock
Sound: David Peto
Assistant director: Ben Anderman

2004-05-18 11:57:57