A generation has been thrown on the scrapheap: no jobs, no skills, no hope. It’s as if everyone in power lives on another planet. Even the school careers officer is on the dole.
Though it’s getting on for 40 years old, Barrie Keeffe’s play could barely seem more urgent: indeed, after decades of neglect, this is the second new production London has seen in as many months.
Keeffe’s fable of three young working-class men adrift – at first unemployed, then living lives of mind-numbing work and petty crime – still has the capacity to sting. One lad finds consolation in Man United, the crowd surging and breathing as one. Another is destined for a career in uniform, and a lethal posting to Belfast. The third seemed to have a better chance: he’s done a government-funded training scheme but has now been left to rot. Privately, they wonder: if they crashed the car they’re about to steal and ended up dead, would it really be such a waste?
Confidently directed by JMK award-winner Liz Stevenson, and designed with suffocating sparseness by Fly Davis, what emerges is a study of needling male aggression and anxiety, full of stifled poetry: A Clockwork Orange in a more desperate key; Waiting for Godot recomposed to a soundtrack of furious punk. At nearly two and a half hours, the script sometimes dawdles, but Stevenson makes the most of the play’s muscularity and her youthful cast bring out its gallows humour as well as its bleakness.
Fisayo Akinade’s Louis is brimful of sadness yet mystifyingly optimistic; Alex Austin’s gangly, toothy Jan looks like he’d rather be building Airfix models than scanning the surroundings for snipers. But the show comes close to being stolen by Brian Vernel as Paul, for whom the only real constants are anger and betrayal; with his shaved skull and bruise-dark eyes, he resembles a caged snake, waiting to rear and strike.
- At the Young Vic, London, until 19 December. Box office: 020-7922 2922.
