Too many bangs
Lloyd Evans
Justice Old Red Lion The Reappearance of Christ in the East End White Bear The Old Red Lion is a relaxed and civilised pub with an atmospheric little theatre upstairs. Many great plays have been staged there. Christopher Hanvey’s new gangster drama won’t rank among them. It opened with a bound-and-gagged captive lying in a pool of blood being randomly kicked by a thug with a gun. Then it got nasty. The thug shot the prisoner in the stomach. The sudden bang was so ferocious that I thought my eardrums had burst, and the sight of a bullet casing popping from the breach of the gun made me wonder if a live round had been fired. When the lights dimmed I was genuinely relieved that the dead actor got up and walked off-stage.
These casual atrocities were set in Belfast and the laborious plot involved groups of loyalists engaged in the importation of some costly, brain-fuddling sedative. Cocaine, I think. Inevitably there were many swindles, threats, curses and betrayals. Several scenes involved the full cast shrieking at each other at the tops of their voices. The show culminated in an act of flamboyant brutality. A dealer attacked a pregnant crack-whore and kicked her half to death, thus depriving her of her unborn child. Given that she was his principal source of cash and sex, his motives were rather hard to detect. Maybe he had become a secret devotee of abstinence and was seeking to rid himself of temptation?
Further unpleasantness followed. The dealer was visited by the beaten crackwhore’s boyfriend, played by the author, Christopher Hanvey. After a few yelled obscenities, he produced the damned gun again. I promptly buried my head in my lap and stuffed my fingers deep into my ears. More angry shouting followed. Barely able to make out the dialogue, I raised my face to see what was going on. The dealer had ducked and the enraged boyfriend was wildly aiming the weapon at me. This, I suspect, is the first time a writer has pointed a gun at a critic during a play. And I must say it somewhat impaired my enjoyment. The show ended with a prolonged burst of gunfire, and as stricken actors fell dead on all sides I got up and ran for it.
The quest for realism is perfectly admirable but pushed too far it turns into something sordid and desperate. If my world-outlook were as bleak as Christopher Hanvey’s, I’d load that stage pistol with a live round and do a Kurt Cobain.
Compared with the Old Red Lion, the White Bear is a bit of a dive. Filthy carpets, a widescreen TV, lads and dads guzzling lager while nippers and pit bulls chase each other around the bar stools. The music is so loud that the staff have learnt to lip-read. Tucked away behind this chaotic sweat-box is a small studio theatre. To my surprise, the pub-rock continued thumping away throughout the performance of Peter Hamilton’s new play, The Reappearance of Christ in the East End.
The title seems to promise something mysterious and transcendent, but this is a modest, heartfelt comedy of manners. The setting is a Stepney comprehensive where the staffroom is populated by well-meaning misfits. There’s Barry, the ageing Marxist-turned-cynic. There’s posh Pat who has married a millionaire and sends her sons to Eton. Ailish is a nunnish singleton who is captivated by Roger, an idealistic new RE teacher. The best moments emerge from the staffroom banter.
Phil Goldacre’s Barry observes that teachers are no longer given nicknames by their pupils, a sure sign of their waning authority. The fretful Ailish (played with great assurance by Stacha Hicks) agrees with him. ‘Yesterday a boy said I had a face like a pig’s cunt. And if you complain to the parents you get more of the same.’ The contrast between the coarseness of the language and the simple radiance of Ailish’s personality makes this speech thoroughly shocking.
The show is hampered by threadbare production values and some nervy and uneven performances. There’s no glass in the windows and the actors look as if they’ve been asked to turn up in their own clothes. When Roger takes Ailish for a walk through Burnham Beeches, the location is suggested by the lowering of a twig on strings. Their incipient affair is deliberately and cruelly ruined by Roger’s nannying witch of a mother. The rivals meet over tea and scones, a scene that bore all the hallmarks of a rich theatrical pleasure. Alas the comedy of embarrassment doesn’t really work with Bon Jovi going full blast next door.
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