Review: Theatre

Saved Edward Bond, Lyric, Hammersmith, dir Sean Holmes, Morgan Watkins

Compelling. The sterile backdrop to Mary and Fred’s front room is unrelenting as it moves up and down like the slamming of steel shutters, cutting episode by episode. It’s claustrophobic, deliberately so, yet you are always aware of space. We watch the disintegration of Len and Pam, sort of girlfriend and boyfriend, as they become like Mary and Fred, Pam’s parents. Always fighting, tearing chunks out of each other, the characters are like chickens, so absorbed in pecking each other that they fail to realise that they themselves are being eaten. The play’s outer world is the gang, seen at its most devastating in the stoning of the baby, and made more horrific by the absence of sound. We are left to fill in the blanks ourselves. Bond’s vision is bleak but the message is clear if you strip away hope, decency, respect then sooner or later the group turns in on itself. The play has a ‘play for today’ feel. The accents caricatured belonging to a by-gone time. Its action truncated, episodic, so that the whole experience becomes a forensic exercise. Yet the production is compelling throughout. Written in 1965, and revived after the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain’s censure in 1967, today it seems sadly prophetic set against the recent riots and looting….