Sunday, November 9, 2014

'Cans' at Theatre 503, 7th November 2014

Set entirely in a dingy Yorkshire garage, Cans begins with its two characters drowning trapped mice.  It isn't the cheeriest opening sequence I've ever seen, but then this isn't the cheeriest play I've ever seen either.  Writer Stuart Slade grasps a very painful and timely nettle; historic sexual abuse in the entertainment industry.  With the cackle of Savile still ringing in our ears, this feels like theatre set firmly in 2014.

Seizing upon a wider sense of public betrayal and anger; Cans understands that examining the actual abuse is next to impossible to tastefully stage, so instead we probe the aftermath. The vehicles for this drama are Uncle Len (Graham O'Mara) and his niece Jen (Jennifer Clement), a disconsolate, slightly crushed pair who glug their way through Strongbow while hiding from the world in their garage.

Len is instantly familiar; an extroverted loudmouth who hoots and hollers in unfunny skits to conceal his own inadequacies.  He's not the brightest tool in the shed and we quickly surmise that he's pissed away the best years of his life in a haze of cheap cider and nights spent glued to a barstool.  For all that, we sense a glimmer of basic kindness deep down inside.  Gradually we understand that his personality is a symptom of some deeper psychological wounds.

The straightman to his acting out is his niece Jen, who's more outwardly depressed.  Sullen, withdrawn and hiding underneath a baggy jumper, she's volatile and defensive.  We quickly realise that she's grieving, and like detectives we slowly piece together the jigsaw of what's happened.  Without spoiling too much, her beloved father has died in disgrace and the play follows her through the stages of grief as she tries to come to terms with her perception of him.

Though this is a two man play there's a third, unseen character looming above. Never named, Jen's father and Len's brother haunts the play; from the junk behind the characters, to the boxes of clothes, books and anecdotes that reveal the life of the dead man.  Eventually we build a mental picture of the man; an amalgam of Rolf Harris and Dave Lee Travis with a pinch of Alan Partridge for good measure.  Our perceptions gradually shift throughout the play, roughly aligning with Jen's.

Cans swings its tonal pendulum between depressing and funny, the generally gloomy tone punctuated by moments of mordant black humour and odd splodge of genuine goofiness. What shines through above all else is an extreme empathy; most obviously towards Jen and Len, but stretching out to the peripheral characters we only hear about and even, boldly, towards the disgraced rapist.

The idea of 'sympathy for the rapist' is a unimaginably deadly dramatic minefield, especially when the victims are anonymous off-stage presences.  Cans successfully traverses it not by justifying or defending unforgivable actions, but by analysing them as the actions of a person rather than a monster.  Cleverly we demolish some false defences: that it happened so long ago that he can't be held accountable now, that the good the rapist did in his life outweighs the bad or that simply someone who was such a good father couldn't possibly have done things like this.

Slade is smart enough to allow us to identify and sympathise with his characters at precisely the same time as we recognise that they're in deep denial.  This is the knot that lies at the heart of the play, layers upon layers of lies, anger and paranoia gradually being disentangled and discarded until we arrive at a cathartic acceptance that Cans has painfully earned.

Both Graham O'Mara and Jennifer Clement give beautifully complex performances. They quickly establish a mutually supportive performance style whereby one can feed from the other's performance.  The sense that they're old friends bouncing off each is crucial to making the characters work, and at their best moments you can almost peer inside their heads and watch their thoughts formulate.  Though both Jen and Len are occasionally exasperating and sometimes just plain wrong, the carefully pitched performances give us space to totally disagree with them and still find them basically likeable.  

The entire play being set inside a concrete walled garage doesn't make for the most dynamic staging you'll ever see; but the grey walls adequately mirror the numb emotional funk that fills the play, something underlined by the detritus of a dead man that's scattered all around them.  Among this naturalistic scenery there's a few expressionistic touches, between scenes the fluorescent flicker madly, sending harsh shadows across the scattered furniture.   Within this there's a careful attention to detail.  As we go through the dead man's possessions we can read the books he read, all of which appear to have been chosen specifically for what they say about him.  It's touches like these that elevate a production above the crowd, cramming character into even the smallest part of the production.

I go to the theatre a lot, and (with some exceptions) you can usually tell within the first 10 minutes whether a play is going to suck.  In Cans I realised almost straight away that it was going to be great.  This is a confident, intelligent and well executed piece of drama that deserves an audience.  Go check it out!

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