Theatre Review: The Political History of Smack and Crack at Weston Studio, Bristol Old Vic

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

The Political History of Smack and Crack traces the present-day glut of hard drugs awash on the streets of Manchester and other British cities back to an explosion of availability in 1980s Thatcherite Britain, arguing its root cause was a combination of Tory foreign policy and the desire to subdue the riots catching light in urban working-class districts across the land.

If that sounds like a treatise of abstract polemic then, in fact, it’s anything but: this urgent and energetic 80-minute two-hander—winner in Edinburgh 2018 of Summerhall’s Lustrum Award—threads this history through a deeply personal love story of addiction, recovery and the struggle to get clean of drugs, drawn from writer Ed Edwards’s own personal experiences.

Mandy and Neil are childhood friends and lifelong addicts, born and bred to deprivation and abuse in Manchester’s Moss Side. Between them, they narrate the story of their lives, fluidly weaving past with present in an ongoing cycle of dependency and rehabilitation, where shoplifting, prostitution and robbing from chemists alternate with sessions at Narcotics Anonymous and the support of friends.

It’s gritty and often tough to watch but also endearingly warm and funny, made so by riveting performances from Eve Steele, sure-footedly reprising her role as Mandy from the show’s previous runs, and newcomer William Fox taking over from Neil Bell in the role of Neil. The two break out of their narration to characterise other players in the story: instantly we are with Irish Tony watching a policeman being attacked in the riots, Mandy’s mother with a broken arm walking home from A&E to save the fiver a doctor gave her for a taxi, or Martin offering a spare room and lashings of unheeded advice. Nimbly switching back into the story, they are unapologetic but vulnerable, caught in a purgatory between life and death with confusion and self-loathing pock-marking their back-and-forth bravado and debate.

On the Weston Studio’s unadorned stage, Cressida Brown’s direction focuses intensely on the actors, their fleet physicality filling the space but supporting rather than overwhelming the storytelling. Similarly, Richard Williamson's lighting and Jon McLeod’s sound design are unobtrusive in the main, used with sparing intensity to highlight moments of particular tension.

Such is the pull of this absorbing and affecting tale of mismatched love and survival even after death that the political elements, though cleverly spliced into the action, can occasionally feel intrusive. But the play’s message is a shocking and hard-hitting one, leading you to question and want to find out more, ultimately inseparable from the characters whose lives it touches.

Reviewed on 22 January 2020 | Images: The Other Richard

Theatre Review: Unicorns, Almost at Weston Studio, Bristol Old Vic

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

Having so movingly captured the physical and psychological traumas of three Bristolian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan with Pink Mist, Owen Sheers now brings his lyricism to the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two. Unicorns, Almost commemorates the life of poet Keith Douglas, who survived the hell of tank warfare in the Western Desert, only to be killed by a mortar shell three days after the D-Day landings in Normandy, aged just 24.

As a child, Douglas dreamt of fighting on horseback, joining the cavalry only to find horses had been replaced by tanks. Such romanticism also led him to hijack a truck in Egypt and escape his safe army headquarters desk job, heading for the heart of the action; fearing death, it seems he also raced towards it.



In this one-man play, Dan Krikler embodies Douglas’s contradictions and pent up, relentless energy, pacing the stage as he relives childhood memories or tells of the women he has loved so ardently; urgent, whirlwind affairs of dancing and stolen nights leading to four broken engagements—no time to waste when the next day could be your last.

With a change of scarf or the donning of a beret or coat, Krikler’s performance is beautifully judged, the words seeming to pour out of him. He frequently addresses the audience directly, inviting us into the sombre theatre of war and its overture of bombardment. Director John Retallack and sound and lighting designers Jon Nicholls and Ben Pickersgill support rather than overshadow this narrative with a simple army encampment staging, a typewriter to the side and banner of handwriting melding with voiceovers, projections and a soundscape of gunfire and shelling.

Interspersed between Douglas’s reminiscences are his poems—unsentimental but compassionate in their spare and honest tone. He describes the brutalities of warfare, depicting mangled and decomposing corpses and his own increasing facility for killing: “how easy it is to make a ghost”. Yet here too is the comradeship a soldier begins to feel for his enemy in their suffering on war’s common stage. Douglas looks directly where many of us would look away; not for him the British officers’ tendency to contain horrors within sporting metaphors of cricket and horses.



While recognising the works of Great War poets such as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, Douglas seeks to carve his own path. Predicting his demise—perhaps obsessed with it—and knowing time to be short, many of his final battles are internal. He struggles to put his thoughts into words that will satisfy rather than frustrate him, to leave a legacy for those who will view him through “time’s wrong-way telescope” ten years hence.

In the context of the play’s final moments, “Simplify Me When I’m Dead” emerges as a paean to a life of compressed intensity. Though it took time for Douglas to be recognised in the aftermath of war, with the slender volumes of his poetry languishing untouched on bookshop shelves, Unicorns, Almost is a sobering but poignantly illuminating memorial to a voice silenced far too early.

Reviewed on 4 September 2019 | Images: Contributed

Theatre Review: 1972: The Future of Sex

This review was first written for British Theatre Guide

In rewinding the decades to the early 1970s, The Wardrobe Ensemble’s infectiously silly, sad and true take on adolescent sexuality reminds us that while the clothes and music may change over the years, the initial awkwardness and tentative first steps toward self-discovery remain the same.

It’s a welcome return for this production to the ensemble’s home city of Bristol, having toured around the UK since its première in 2015.

1972 was supposedly the Age of Aquarius: a drug-induced, hallucinogenic uprising of permissive free love, loosening society’s rigid grip. David Bowie was in his Ziggy Stardust phase and androgyny was hip. It’s easy to see this as a simpler, more innocently loving time, pre-Internet porn and its heightened expectations. But try telling that to the couples we first meet, lined up like rabbits caught in the headlights, in this hour-long exploration of the eggshells we tread on when tentatively negotiating intimate relationships.

Hannah Kamen’s Christine decides she’s going to sleep with her rock band boyfriend Rich (Ben Vardy) but begins to worry about the mechanics and decides that watching the luridly erotic film Deep Throat will show her all she needs to know. In an era when Gay Pride is in its infancy, Anna (Jesse Meadows) spots Emily Greenslade’s Tessa across the racks of albums in a record shop and decides she’s the coolest person she’s ever seen.

Penny (Helena Middleton) explores feminist theories and D H Lawrence’s scandalous Lady Chatterley’s Lover with her sociology lecturer Martin (a gyrating performance from Tom England), before discovering his theoretical enlightenment doesn’t always stretch to practical equality. Meanwhile, Bowie-inspired Anton (James Newton) examines his sexuality alone in his bedroom; dressing and undressing in borrowed clothes, but afraid of revealing himself to his parents.

Co-directors Tom Brennan and Jesse Jones have great fun intercutting characters and action, strongly assisted by Tom Crosley-Thorne’s evocative live music and Rachael Duthie’s striking lighting design. Running between their four microphone stands as though they are outposts in a game of rounders, the ensemble delivers narrative, song and innermost thoughts, before quickly resetting to the next scene.

There’s clever period detail in costumes and references—space hoppers, glam rock glitter and Angel Delight—and some standout moments: Anna’s physical ecstasy at Tessa’s proposition sees her lifted and floating across the room while Tom England continues his confused contortions as the ever-dancing Brian deserted by his partner.

Flashes forward link this youthful retrospective to present-day middle-aged disappointment, and it doesn’t end well; opportunities for real love are lost and chance meetings in later life puncture the balloon of illusion. Even Germaine Greer falls short in the end, the lauded writer of The Female Eunuch scraping the barrel with her appearance on Celebrity Big Brother.

It’s inventive and energetic stuff; sometimes rough around the edges but fizzing with creativity. The more things change, the more they stay the same in this rite of passage; it’s the universality of that message that elevates 1972: The Future of Sex into a more thoughtful and reflective work than it first appears.

Reviewed on 1 May 2019 | Images: Jack Offord