Manchester-based playwright Kevin Fegan has become a cult local writer since his drugs-and-dance play, Excess XS. Having recently set up the Big Theatre Company, Fegan returns to Contact with his latest offering, Totally Wired. Fegan is still exploring the drug and dance phenomenon but he is now looking more at the aftermath, at how family and finances are affected.
Spider, played with shivering intensity by Joanna Sycz, is a member of the ecstasy generation who hasn't quite got round to settling down. When her father kicks her and her boyfriend, Liam, out of his house, they sneak back in to pinch the family coffers, which they spend on drugs and a 10-ton truck. Implausible? Well, Spider's father is a truck-driver, and we're supposed to see that no matter how much we fight our parents, we cannot escape their influence.
OK, it's hardly ground-breaking stuff, and neither is Liam's nihilistic arrogance. Looking like a youthful Keith Allen and suggesting the same roguish intelligence, Liam - played by an actor known, confusingly, as Spyder - swaggers about the stage, bemoaning the state of the nation, while insisting, "I'm not slacking. I've been sorting out supplies".
Thankfully, the sparsely-used drug-trance moments are well-worked, opting for impassioned bleary-eyed asides rather than sensational effects. The familiar story-line is given a twist of life by a cyberspace sub-plot, as Spider - all agitated limbs - is approached by an internet medium (yes, the world-wide web) who claims to be downloading messages from her dead mother. All sorts of investigations ensue as the trembling lines of Spider's past begin to thin and break.
Sycz is excellent throughout, while Glenn Cunningham gives a strong performance as Wayne, Spider's father, unsure of how much of the truth to disclose. Having been nicely set up, the plot seems to peter out in the last quarter, trading its hard-won earnestness for meaningless abstractions. At only 70 minutes, though, the play's brevity saves it from becoming just another cobweb in the wind.
