WISE GUYS: Osment: Red Ladder Theatre Company: On tour to 12th December 2002
WISE GUYS: Philip Osment: Red Ladder Theatre Company: www.redladder.co.uk
On tour, to 12th December 2002
Runs 1hr 08 minutes. No interval
Review: Mark Courtice at Lighthouse, Poole: 14th November 2002
Worthy moments do not detract from well written and acted exploration of yob culture.A sofa centre stage is often a bad sign - promising that people will just sit there and talk - a lot. There is one at the centre of this skeletal set (designed by Leslie Travers for a production touring to all sorts of spaces, many of them not theatres), but it serves as car, bike, rocky Scottish outcrop as this lively piece covers a lot of ground. The programme is like a worksheet, and there is a post show discussion, so we know we are in for a thumping great message, but this show is better written and acted than much issue based work, and it has energy and action in abundance.
Wise Guys explores the problem of those young men for whom drugs, petty crime and random violence are the norm - yob culture. Their housing-estate world is the starting-point for a road movie story about taking an old man to see, for the last time, the Highlands where he was brought up. Osment has written a piece which is often genuinely frightening and occasionally moving. In trying to understand as well as describe this outlaw world, dialogue and speeches do the job, but feel authentic. The moments of that clarity that rough poetry can give don't seem pretentious even in the mouths of these tough lads.
The production by Wendy Harris is pacy and physical; the set works, clattering and bulging under the pressure of the energy of the youths trapped within it. Lighting and video did not help, the show was underlit at the beginning and the film and video was too small or grainy to add much.
The cast of four young men are good -there is only one female character, not well played by one of the cast who could do with watching Hull Truck's Bouncers to see how macho men play believable women. However, David Bell is high quality as Mike. This young man is both victim and vicious, and can forgive neither his abusive father nor himself for what he has become. Bell consistently makes him believable, even at the message moment at the end.
Mike: David Bell
Darren: Simon Hadfield
Skid: Sean Cernow
Stephen: Daniel Abelson
Written by: Philip Osment
Director: Wendy Harris
Designed by: Leslie Travers
Lighting Designed by: Marcus Rapley
Video Artist: Boris Cruse
Composer: Ivan Stott
2002-11-19 18:03:15