“You're tinkering with a fundamentally unfair system"
The plays that end up in the Sunday/Monday slot at the Finborough have to ride
the luck of the draw when it comes to the sets upon which they have to perch,
borrowing space as they do from the main show. And for Chris Dunkley’s new play
The Precariat, the garishness of Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi’s set has actually
worked well here for in having to cover it up with dark drapes, much of design
consultant James Turner’s work is then done. It forms the ideal backdrop for
the sparse bits of battered furniture and the array of video screens that
litter the intimate space in which this tale of a teenage North Londoner trying
to find his place in a world decimated by the financial crisis.
Fin is a 15 year old schoolboy and is clearly a bright boy but the road ahead
is far from clear. His mother is depressed and disconnected, his younger
brother has fallen in with a bad crowd and has started taking drugs and his petty
criminal father is barely on the scene. And in a Tottenham still recovering
from the seismic shock of the 2011 riots, Fin only sees opportunities shrinking
away for him and his brother alike, both in terms of the lack of decent jobs in
the immediate future and with the long-term prospects in a society that has
been irrevocably broken.
Dunkley is a writer I’ve come to admire (I made my first ever trip to
Southampton to see his
Smallholding) with a gift for combining powerfully
intimate stories with a wider social context, and it is a similar model that he
employs here. Sharply observed dialogue captures a visceral sense of how
disaffected this world is – Kirsty Besterman is blistering as Bethan, the very
epitome of parental dysfunction as she invites her feckless ex over, ostensibly
to reconnect with his sons but really just to have a quickie in the flat – and as
the dynamics of the family shift with desperation and darkness creeping in from
all sides, there’s a pungently compelling depiction of the seemingly inescapable
trap that social, economic and cultural deprivation creates.
What works less well is the attempts to locate this drama in the big picture,
the proselytising and prophesising about the evils of capitalism and damage
that will be consequently wreaked on the world doesn’t ever feel that natural,
not least coming out of the mouth of a 15 year old. These references to the
wider world feel shoehorned in and though Scott Chambers is superbly
naturalistic as the troubled adolescent Fin, he struggles to make such erudition
feel genuinely real.
Part of this also comes from a delivery of the North London patois which I
personally found near-impossible to decipher at times. It sounds incredibly
authentic but so much of his dialogue was swallowed up that I was left grateful
for the playtext. Likewise with the sound effects for some of the supporting
characters’ voices– drug lord Balthazar is superbly and creepily portrayed
through video alone and Fin’s one ray of light is the friendly voice on the
other end of the drive-thru intercom who we only ever hear – Chris New’s
direction perhaps erred on the side of atmosphere rather than clarity, this was
a rare time that my deafness really impacted on being able to fully comprehend
a play in such a small theatre.
But New’s use of the video screens is frequently witty and inspired, always
feeling an integral part of the production rather than something bolted-on for
effect, and he navigates the quicksilver shifts in tone well, balancing the
grimness with an everyday levity, reminding us that lives like these are being
lived all around us and are becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Perhaps the
play could have done with a little more ambiguity in its political arguments to
create an intellectual debate to match the physical drama, but this still
remains an ambitious attempt at capturing something of the modern malaise that
is blighting so much of our disaffected youth.
Running time: 80 minutes (without interval)
Playtext cost: £3
Booking until 30th July
Labels: Ben Mars, Chris Dunkley, Chris New, David Hayler, Kirsty Besterman, Scott Chambers