Shôn Dale-Jones’s greengrocer father was a devotee of Margaret Thatcher and believed in taking responsibility for yourself. His paternal grandmother, Phyllis, believed in community, and fell out with her son over politics. They are now buried side by side in the local graveyard. Dale-Jones grew up torn between the two and was obsessed by the BBC series The Legend of Robin Hood. So at the age of 10 he decided to rob the local bank.
Forty years on, he is still wondering about the inequalities in our society. When we hear statistics such as the fact that there are up to 150 million children in the world living on the streets, we are also outraged for a moment, before we go back to what we were doing. Dale-Jones links our feelings of helplessness to something bigger: we have bought into the narrative of capitalism that keeps us in thrall to the interests of the banks and big business.
He talks about seeing his name and image on a poster outside a theatre, something he had always longed for, only to feel dissatisfied. Maybe it’s the same kind of dissatisfaction that keeps those who earn more than £100,000 feeling poor in comparison with the super-rich. So Dale-Jones made a piece of art and protested outside a bank with a placard, asking people whether they wanted to join him in robbing the bank. He got arrested for civil disobedience.
Or did he? It doesn’t really matter whether he did or he didn’t – or whether the 10-year-old Dale-Jones did try to be a miniature Robin Hood. After all, the Robin Hood story is itself a myth. This a storytelling show that teasingly plays with fact and fiction as its suggests that we all have the agency to change our own narrative. It’s not quite as smartly crafted as Dale-Jones’ last piece, The Duke, which cleverly explored what we really value, but it is engaging and thoughtful as it gnaws away at inequality of opportunities and the widening gap between rich and poor, and asks whether art really can change the world.
- At Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, until 27 August. Box office: 020-7609 1800. At the Royal Court, London, 4-16 September. Then touring the UK until 4 November.
