“You will rattle the house in which you play,” writes Elliot Warren in an introductory note to the play script of this, his debut show.
The instruction seems intended as much for himself as for a future cast – Warren also performs and co-directs with fellow actor Olivia Brady – and it underpins this punchy, high-octane jaunt around an east London council estate, arriving in Soho after successfully rattling houses at the Edinburgh and Adelaide festivals.
Five characters – angry young man Terrence (Warren), his fiancee Kelly (Brady), his brother Reiss, their grandad, and local drug dealer Jamal – strut and fret their way through an energetic 80 minutes, blending stylised physicality with a lyricism that is part Shakespearean poetry, part Anglo-Saxon filth.
It’s a bold combination, and one that demands the audience’s attention – sometimes literally, with the action spilling over into the front row. Set-piece physical scenes – a bar brawl, a tumble under the duvet, a battle with a rat infestation – carry a stylised, freeze-frame intensity reminiscent of the films of Guy Ritchie or Quentin Tarantino. In between, each character takes his or her turn with a spotlit monologue, exploring life in this “rotten shitstorm of concrete housing”.
At the heart of the play lies Warren’s desire to make us look again – at the estates casually dismissed as eyesores; at their inhabitants, whose lives, in all their messy, loving glory, are, as Kelly puts it, “obscure to the hordes of the norm”. It’s a laudable aim, and if, under all the linguistic fireworks and knockabout physicality, we never quite learn enough about the characters and their relationships to fully engage with them emotionally, Warren and his cast ensure that we cannot look away.
• Flesh and Bone is at the Soho Theatre Upstairs, London, until 21 July
