THE BABY AND FLY PIE. To 30 July.

Manchester

THE BABY AND FLY PIE
by Melvin Burgess adapted by Lavinia Murray

Royal Exchange Studio To 30 July 2005
Mon-Fri 7.30pm Sat 8pm Mat Thu 2.3pm Sat 4pm
Runs 1hr 25min No interval

TICKETS: 0161 833 9833
www.royalexchange.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 23 July

Tough stuff in too fancy a theatre-wrapping.Melvin Burgess writes gritty novels for teenagers; the sex, chips and rock 'n' roll of Debbie Horsefield's early sixties Manchester, running in the Royal Exchange main-house, is mildness itself compared with the parallel-universe Manchester where Lavinia Murrray sets her stage adaptation of Burgess's (originally London-set) novel.

Violence, drugs, child prostitution and kidnap are features of this dysfunctional society where a shadowy mother-figure exploits young orphans and a trio of young people have to find their way through a maze of adult-engendered threat.

Aimed at 12+, this production played daytimes up to the end of school terms, and young audiences might have found more humour in the staging, and action, than the Saturday night crowd I joined.

Seats have been cleared from the Exchange Studio, with stiffened cardboard boxes for seating, and audience-members enjoined to sit and stand alternatively at a bell's sound: Britain's first Pavlovian theatre.

The standing periods turn out to be mere moments for theatre staff to rearrange the cardboard, something promenade productions (to which this aspires) usually manage to accomplish more smoothly.

There's certainly a sense of dereliction and the lack of any home for Sham, Jane and Fly Pie (an aspirant baker, his name explained through a day's activity down the bakery). And their trawl through the audience evokes the trio's struggles against hostile forces when they 'inherit' a millionaire's kidnapped baby from a gang-member they come across in a deserted site.

Yet Iqbal Khan's theatrically stylised production can be obstructive. How will teenagers used to cinematic CGI take to the close-up view of grotesque masks? How does the 'surprise' of being in a moveable audience balance against the poor views the form can offer?

It's the more sustained scenes, where the central trio's personalities are tested against events that registers most keenly. Such as a telephone-kiosk argument over what should be said to the kidnapped kid's parents.

While there's dependable work from all the cast, the more incidental characters remain elusive - as perhaps they are in the lives of these young transients clinging together for solidity.

Calum Callaghan's Sham also remains incomplete, the adaptation disabled by the staging from establishing him before he peels off from his friends, heading towards a downward track of individual opportunism.

Benjamin Warren's Fly Pie and Emma Hartley-Miller's Jane are the show's mainstays. Both show their young characters' growth through responses to adventures that both test and expand their resourcefulness and interdependence. These performances give the production some point, it's a shame they have to struggle through the surrounding thickets of an intrusive, largely unnecessary theatricality.

Sham: Calum Callaghan
Fly Pie: Benjamin Warren
Jane: Emma Hartley-Miller
Man/Luke/Scousie/Tallis: Leigh Symonds
Mother/Shelly/etc: Sarah Ball

Director: Iqbal Khan
Designer: Angela Simpson
Lighting: Kay Harding
Sound: Gerry Marsden
Puppet-making: Alison Duddle
Puppet-movement: Mark Whitaker

2005-07-27 13:12:40