WASTELAND To 6 June.

Nottingham/Touring.

WASTELAND
by Laura Lomas.

New Perspectives Theatre Company Tour to 6 June 2009.
Run: 1hr 15min No interval.
Review: Alan Geary: 22 May 2009 at Lakeside Arts Centre Nottingham.

A well-acted apologia for low-life criminality.
If you’re thinking of emigrating on the grounds that the country’s gone to the dogs, Wasteland will do nothing to change your mind. It presents contemporary England as a place bleak beyond belief, so broken that no ordinary person would want to be part of it. And there’s no interval.

The plot’s loosely based on the killing of Fred Barras during that failed burglary at a Norfolk farm. But, since the underlying idea seems to be that low-life criminals are actually victims of the system, the protagonist, Jamie (Joe Doherty), is a sympathetic figure. So indeed are half-brother Clayton (Karl Haynes) and girlfriend Meghan (Sophie Ellerby).

All three actors are horribly convincing, especially Haynes. His character, already a psychological ruin before he joined up, presumably for Iraq, was finished off by his army experience. Meghan, smoking, drinking and cutting school - good news for anyone who might have had to teach her - has a useless mother. Jamie, on probation, is the only one of the three who's making any effort to drag himself upwards.

It’s all staged not so much in the round as in the long: the audience is strung out on each side of a railway station platform. There are realistic train noises, and so forth; but the design is unhelpful if you want to see everything that’s going on. And, what with the authentically mumbled dialogue, the plot isn’t always easy to follow.

A major bit that isn’t mumbled is embarrassingly predictable. When Jamie is escaping from the horrors of his life in Newark - in real life an attractive town - he goes fishing in the canal (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning). Along comes Meghan and, somewhat out of character, he delivers a stock eulogy about the beauty of the symbol of freedom he dragged out of the water on a previous foray (Kes).

Writer Laura Lomas and director Esther Richardson haven’t come up with a tea-party here. The four-letter words, the infantile level of reasoning from, especially, Clayton and Meghan, and, most worryingly, the whining victim culture portrayed make it a gruelling play-going experience.

Jamie: Joe Doherty.
Meghan: Sophie Ellerby.
Clayton: Karl Haynes.

Director: Esther Richardson.
Designer: Oliver Chapman.
Lighting: Mark Dimmock.
Sound: Adam McCready.

2009-05-24 00:49:59