Theatre II
Stalemate
Wilfred De'Ath
Outskirts (RSC Warehouse) We are in 1969. The mise-en-scene is a rubbish dump overlooking Crystal Palace. Two teenagers, Del and Bob, talk too much about sex. Unable to get it, they resort to Paki-bashing instead. Bob is, or seems, the stronger of the two: he scorns education, respectability, but an over-possessive mother holds him in thrall. Del dreams of leaving South London altogether: he discerns, correctly, that education is the only way out . . We are in 1981. sob is still living with his mother and he is married now — alas, not happily. Unable to find employment, he has Joined a fascist organisation — the National Front, one presumes. Del has escaped to North London (Islington) and schoolteaching. He writes articles for a magazine that no one ever reads. The two meet up again to compare their joint experience ;but new the memory of their Paki-bashing seems all they really have in common. Hanif Kureishi, who is only 25 and the product of an Anglo-Pakistani marriage, has made an interesting little play out of this rather unpromising material. It is a tribute to the fluidity and tautness of his dialogue (I say dialogue rather than writing because this might easily be a radio play transferred to the stage) that 98 minutes is enough — more than enough — to delineate the changes, significant and otherwise, that have occurred in these two young lives in the intervening 12 years. And it is a tribute to the powerful talents of two young actors, David Bamber and Tony Guilfoyle, that we have no difficulty in distinguishing two constantly interchanging time sequences.
It would be hard to imagine a more appropriate setting than the RSC Warehouse for Outskirts: Jenny Beavan has devised a gigantic sheet covered in swirls of dirty brown Sandtex to convey the rubbish dump — actual, human, and metaphorical — of Mr Kureishi's imagination. Here the two likely lads besport themselves: curse, drink beer out of cans, fantasise about girls, and generally litter us with the pathetic debris of their unfulfilled lives.
It would not take a seer of genius to perceive that, by the end of the evening, something has gone wrong — with the play itself as well as with the depressing society that it depicts. Through youthfulness or inexperience (though I see he has been appointed writer in residence at the Royal Court) Mr Kureishi fails to convince us that the reasons for Bob's failure are entirely social, though that would seem to be his message ('this country, if anything, that's the ill one, not me'). Might he not be quite simply the victim of a mother who will not let him go? (This part, a key one, is played with superb supineness by Marjorie Yates.) We learn nothing of Del's parents but they, presumably, have the good sense to see that sons must grow up and flee the nest. There is also a suggestion, barely stated, perhaps not intentional, that Del's attachment to Bob is a homosexual one.
Mr Kureishi's dialogue is arty rather than realistic: it might be, indeed has been, described as Crystal Palace baroque. (One imagines that when he makes his reputation, as I do not doubt he will, he will be dubbed the Noel Coward of New Cross, the Pirandello of Peckham Rye, the Osborne of the Orpington By-Pass etc.) At times the characters sound as though they are shouting at each other across vast expanses of darkness, but that perhaps is the intention. Much of the social observation is acute ('I suppose you buy books and video equipment now,' Bob says to Del when he learns of his job) and the flowing scene-changes, indoors and outdoors, are skilfully handled by the writer as well as by his director, Howard Davies.
'Probably I'll kill myself when I'm 30,' says Bob in what would bring down the curtain on Outskirts if there was a curtain to bring down. It sets the tone of a thoroughly depressing evening. One comes away from what Milton Shulman has called the Wailing Wall of the Warehouse wondering if there can be any hope at all for the brave new world that has such creatures in it. But, then, it is always good to welcome an interesting new writer. And Mr Kureishi is undoubtedly that.
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