This was my first visit to the White Bear Theatre in Kennington since it’s been refurbished. The pub is now spacious and airy, serving delicious looking food with a lovely beer garden at the back for early evening, summer socialising. The theatre has now moved upstairs and is a comfortable, focussed little space in which to enjoy up-close encounters with new writing and classics.It’s currently home to Simon David Eden’s production of his second play GIFT OF THE GAB following the success of his first, THE ALBATROSS 3RD & MAIN, in Brighton and at London’s Park Theatre.
The action takes place in Brighton, in the 1970’s. Although I'm not sure why as the location and period has no impact on the plot beyond a few grumbles at the newspaper.
A gang of intriguing and beautifully characterised low-life, con-artists gather in a seedy cafe, to discuss their hustle which entails spotting valuables worth stealing, when they visit homes posing as security experts. They bicker in a Pinteresque way about the minutiae of their squalid existence and you wait, excited to watch them get caught up in an audacious crime caper, I was hoping for a grungy, British OCEANS ELEVEN.
And you wait, and wait and wait and nothing happens beyond laborious exposition until just before the interval when someone mentions stealing a book. In Act Two there’s an attempt to profit from this and someone else hits on the volatile cafe proprietors beautiful daughter. And that’s it. What a letdown especially as the marketing blurb promises -
“1979. The bitter Winter of Discontent. The whole nation is at war with itself, battling industrial strikes, severe unemployment, crippling inflation and fears over immigration and home-grown terrorism. But that's not going to cramp the style of a den of thieves in Brighton... But even they know the end of an era is nigh and their days are numbered, so each is after one last big score before the law and society's shifting sands catch up to them”
If only. What a fascinating play that would have been. Instead we get a bit of messing around with an off-stage guard dog and a running gag about a consignment of dodgy shoes.
Reading of Eden’s track record in film I'm amazed he is so inept, on this occasion, at structuring a plot. And there’s not much flair or flow to his staging either. Lumbered with a cumbersome set, scenes which could have dove-tailed directly from one to the other are instead broken up with endless blackouts in which the actors move furniture around unnecessarily, preventing any momentum to the story. Why clear the stage for a short scene in which a character shouts at an off-stage car before the cast must laboriously reset everything again, when the altercation with the driver could have been integrated into the main action? Why establish that the waitress has a metal leg and the cafe has a new microwave when it contributes nothing to the story?
But I did love the cast and characters. I’ve admired Charlie Allen’s acting before but in this he excels, transforming himself with some brilliant hair styling into a middle-aged scum-bag, oozing with the repellent machismo of the 1970’s. Ross Boatmen (from TV’s Mum) combines an amiable exterior with flashes of greed and maliciousness. Ivanhoe Norona is convincingly volcanic in his passion and I particularly enjoyed Michael Roberts low key performance which always suggested the cunning and conniving mind of the career criminal.
I hope Simon David Eden keeps these characters and integrates them into a new play that’s as interesting as they are and the marketing promised.
I was expecting something plodding and staid, after all principal actors from the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg first performed this piece in London in 2005 and I was sceptical that it could feel fresh and energised after years of repetition. I'm happy to report that I was wrong, this is an exquisite, often revelatory production of the melancholy Russian masterpiece that is both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny.