THE CAGE. To 30 March.

Southampton

THE CAGE
by Deborah Gearing

Nuffield Theatre To 30 March 2007
Mon-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 2hr 20min One interval

TICKETS: 023 8067 1771
www.nuffieldtheatre.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 March

Ambitious new play presents more challenges than it meets.
The cage is a high-mesh court where troubled teenager Billy plays with a football or smashes a stick against the wire. Quite where it is, is less certain - somewhere a person can be shut in for a day without anybody noticing. It represents protection and imprisonment. Billy retreats there for safety, but when he lashes out at his mother Jackie, she shuts him in, demanding an apology.

Deborah Gearing’s play combines urban realism with unreality. In this inner-city industrial area, a name like Angel Street is more than just ironic. Green, crazy star-shapes appear overhead, and a warm light floods Billy’s friend Nicola as she dances, in close conjunction to the word “golden”.

Words, rather than silence, provide the gold-standard. Billy’s furious a teacher refuses to call him by name. Silence is his method of protest. When mysterious young Len comes with a social resurgence project, the teenagers are given a video (shooting them in colour, their world in stark black-and-white) but cannot think of anything to say into it.

Yet Billy’s Mum, separated years ago from his dad, discovers a new fluency in speech and writing, while Len also opens up a channel of sexual desire which is, potentially hilariously, interrupted mid-stream by the lads running in.

There’s little chance of laughter though in John Burgess’s austere production. Its silent scene-changes and close attention to teenage moods don’t invite the audience in. Fabrice Serafino’s minimal set appears astringent on the Nuffield’s stage: just the cage and a table-plus-chairs carried on for scenes at Jackie’s or a trolley of milk-crates for the dairy where she and, briefly, Billy work. An open studio production might make it all more immediate.

There are fine performances, Jason Maza catching the torment under Billy’s aggression, Clare Wilkie the sense of routine clamping an adult life, while Zawe Ashton gives Nicola a sparky intelligence.

Gearing has many fine, surprising concrete details, like Nicola’s interest in an opera tape contrasting Billy’s hatred of it. And the author knows, as with Len, when not to be over-explicit. But, despite the title, it just fails to mesh.

Nicola: Zawe Ashton
Billy: Jason Maza
Len: Simoin Muller
Bunny: Sonny Muslim
Jackie: Clare Wilkie

Director: John Burgess
Designer: Fabrice Serafino
Lighting: David W Kidd
Sound: Daniel Paine

2007-03-28 01:51:33