Bouncers are a breed apart. They have their own dress code, behavioural traits, even their own language - Geoff Thompson's play is the first time that I've heard "cabbage" used as a verb.
Thompson himself spent over 10 years tending to the cabbage patches around various clubs in the Midlands, and has worked the material into a best-selling book, a Bafta-nominated short film, and this theatrical monologue.
He details how the life of a bouncer is easy to fall into but difficult to crawl out of. The only options for career development appear to be a spell in the nick or the morgue, and certain door people have a disturbing propensity for taking their work home with them. Yet these penguin-suited psychopaths are also husbands, fathers and sons, and Thompson's mission is to explore the painful contradictions of being "a decent man trapped in a dark trade".
The description of violence is as brutally authentic as you might expect - yet the image that really stands out is of a bullied schoolboy crying into his mother's cardigan. Thompson suggests that the bouncer's greatest phobia is fear of getting hurt, and that a life spent hurting other people is a means of facing down the demons.
Craig Conway's intense solo performance is geared more towards the bouncer's vulnerability than his aggression - an introverted, reflective account quite the opposite of the cartoonish expressionism we've come to expect.
The newly established Crewes Gale company fills out the evening by pairing the piece with Thompson's short film featuring Ray Winstone. Placing this at the end seemed a miscalculation, however. It may have worked better as an amuse-bouche, or at least a gentle smack in the mouth, to warm you up for the main event. As it is, the film left me slightly cold, whereas the monologue had me totally cabbaged.
· Until April 30. Box office: 0151-709 4776. Then at Warwick Arts Centre from May 3. Box office: 0247 652 4524.
