Boisterous energy and a self-conscious, street-poetic eloquence earned this tale of a teenage night gone wrong some good reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe. In the cold light of London it feels overly shouty and stagey.
It’s performed with glee and gusto by the young, three-strong cast, and writer and co-director Sam Edmunds – he’s also the lighting designer - clearly means to say something serious about the causes and effects of knife crime: the production, for his company Chalk Line, is supporting the Ben Kinsella Trust with their national knife crime intervention outreach. But the pivotal assault feels almost incidental to the broadly comic picture of underage drinking, laddish friendship and first crushes among the youth of Luton.
Kitted out in Nikes and knock-off Ralph Lauren tops, 16-year-old best friends Voice (Nathaniel Christian) and Lewis (Elan Butler) are psyching themselves up for the birthday party of their schoolmate Lakesha (Leanne Henlon). This involves getting an elderly man to buy booze at Boss Man’s cornershop - instead of the wished-for vodka, he gets gin, which only mums drink - and choffing through a pack of contraband fags.
While laconic Lewis exchanges flirty texts with a girl called Jasmine, Voice is scared to tell Lakesha he fancies her. He’s even more scared of the young members of local family the Brooks, who lord it over the streets of Luton with their blacked-out car and black-tracksuited minions. While Christian loudly, lyrically narrates, Butler and Henlon evoke a panoply of supporting characters with deft physicality. From horny uncles to harassed mums, they build up a layered portrait of a once-proud, now depressed but defiantly multicultural town.
One of the key things I took away from this show is that Lutoners were known as Mad Hatters because fumes inhaled during the making of hats, the main local industry, turned their brains. Lacerations to their tongues, from licking straws to make them pliable for weaving into straw boaters, gave them their characteristic accent. Later, as a prime manufacturer of munitions and armour during the Second World War, the town was bombed to bits. Now Luton is most famous for its depressing airport, Stacey Dooley and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson.
As you can tell, Edmunds packs a lot of context and texture into an 80-minute depiction of the town and its robust denizens that’s affectionate without being rose-tinted. The bantering relationship between Voice and Lewis, where affection is buried under a carapace of “your mum” bravado, is also nicely observed. Henlon is very funny as the wryly insinuating Lakesha and as the beady Boss Man.
The set, by Rob Miles, is basic but witty, a series of brick boxes with doors and hatches revealing slogans (“she approaches” for Lakesha, “Dance Warzone” for the party living room) and jokey props. We learn that Lou Bega’s version of Mambo No 5 is an ideal seduction song, whereas a Dutty Wine evokes an unwanted erection. Be warned: there’s quite a lot of audience interaction (not with the erection, though).
The heightened language of Edmunds’ vivid word-pictures starts to grate early on. You wish he and his co-director Vikesh Godhwani would dial the relentless volume and sweaty urgency back a bit: these boys make changing a shirt into a grand palaver. The play starts like a PG version of Trainspotting and ends up like a Jackanory version of James Graham’s Punch, and there isn’t enough modulation in between to make that transition convincing. There’s lots of talent and exuberance here but, like a gin-ebriated teen flirting at a party, it’s not always optimally effective or coherent.
Southwark Playhouse Borough, to Sept 27; southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
