There are at least two plays inside Peter Straughan's Bones, which originated at Live Theatre, Newcastle. One is a black comedy about a bungled kidnapping, the other a sombre study of a self-hating Jew. For all Straughan's ingenuity, the two themes never fully cohere.
Straughan's setting is a run-down porn cinema in 1960s Gateshead run by Jewish half-brothers, Benny and Ruben, who are in hock to a local hood. When a gangster claiming to be Reggie Kray walks in one day, Ruben, who has a history of mental disturbance, decides to hold him to ransom. What follows is partly a parodic comedy in which the brothers, aided by two bumbling projectionists, quarrel over what to do with their captive. But Straughan also suggests that Ruben, who loathes his Jewish identity, discovers a role-model and a protector in the amoral Kray.
I have no problem with Straughan's endless range of allusions. The seedy Tyneside setting evokes Mike Hodges's Get Carter. Hollywood gangster flicks from Key Largo to Reservoir Dogs come to mind, the latter most especially when we get some grisly mutilation. And there is an eerie similarity to Philip Ridley's Ghost From a Perfect Place, seen at Hampstead in 1994, in which a cockney mobster was subjected to cruel and unusual punishment.
What Straughan cannot resolve, however, is his own divided purpose. On one hand, he invites us to laugh at a group of hopeless stumblebums tyrannised by their supposedly defenceless victim. On the other, he wants us to consider the nature of anti-semitism. But, in pure narrative terms, you wonder why Ruben's virulent self-hatred has remained so long a secret. And watching Straughan try to load such heavy intellectual cargo on to a lightweight vehicle is like seeing someone trying to transport gold bullion on the back of a child's bicycle.
Whatever the work's failings, Max Roberts's production has plenty of moment-to-moment vitality. David Cardy as the captive Reg exudes authority even when bound and gagged. Jonathan Slinger as Ruben is full of suppressed hysteria and Trevor Fox is very good as a self-aggrandising projectionist first glimpsed in a Some Like It Hot dress. In the end, however, there is a fatal contradiction between what Straughan wants to say and the ebullient form in which he has chosen to say it.
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