All | Hang Lenny Pope 2007 | cloud:burst 2005/06 | Street Trilogy 2005 | Kid 2003 | Raw 2001 | Car 1999 | ZERO 2008
There is a lad in Car who is a master of the yearning poetics of the automobile. He can hymn off all the details, all the things you never wanted to know about a Ferrari. But by the end he is longing to stop, for just one minute, thinking about cars. The longing to stop on the part of the four lads, to step out of their lives, is the driving force running through this fine piece of contemporary theatre.
Jason, Marky, Nick and Tim have stolen a car. It is what they do. But this time the victim, the solid, hard working citizen who owns the car, chases them, is perhaps injured, and the reality of their lives starts to overwhelm them. They think they are mates, but as one of them says, it is not so; they just steal cars together.
Deftly, the writer Chris O'Connell, builds up for each of them a recognisable character with real depth and humanity. In counterpoint there is Robert, the probation officer, trying to make sense of a world he knows well but can never be part of and Gary, the owner of the car, shaken, crying out for the focus of attention to be entirely on him.
Robert arranges mediation and in a powerful confrontation the interactions between the lad who drove the car away and the victim unfold surprisingly but convincingly. The performances fizz with energy. All of the cast are excellent, but Lee Colley as Jason takes the breath away with the manic diatribes of a lost soul who can see what he wants, just, forever, out of reach. Gary Cargill as Marky, the tough, the man who is not allowed near his wife and children, nevertheless achieves moments which are deeply poignant.
O'Connell weaves his multi-stranded plot with a filmic sensibility and dynamic, and the direction is well-nigh immaculate. It is a roller coaster of a play, with moments of black comedy and pathos. Well worth a visit.
- Leslie Hills.
The Scotsman 11/08/99
29/01/07
Two very different Englands are represented here. Different on the surface anyway. Gary is from Middle England. He earns a good living as a salesman, has a nice wife, a nice home and nice kids. Nick is the product of a dysfunctional family from a sink estate. He gets his kicks by stealing cars with his mates. When they pinch Gary's T-reg VW Golf, their lives begin to spin out of control. And so does Gary's.
Beneath the smooth exterior is a seething cauldron of resentment. Unlike Nick, Gary knows the difference between right and wrong. Or does he? Soon after they meet for mediation, he tells Nick that he wants to pick up the teapot that stands between them and pour its boiling contents all over him. Chris O'Connell's searing script is written to be performed at breakneck speed, and the cast don't let him down. Stephen Banks as Gary and Lee Colley as Nick's even more screwed up mate Jason, are exceptional. They deliver fast yet clear and precise bursts of robust street dialogue, honed into something close to poetry.
Mark Babych's taut direction serves the writing well. This is not comfortable theatre, but it is exhilarating and challenging.
- Chris Arnot
The Guardian 11/08/99
29/01/07
Violence, drug abuse, murder and suicide would hardly seem palatable ingredients for an entertaining theatre night out. Yet Car, performed by Theatre Absolute at the Royal Exchange Studio Theatre, is one of the most powerful plays I've seen.
Chris O'Connell's award winning work - spoken in the vibrant street talk we hear every day - sounds like urban poetry. It's superbly directed by Mark Babych and performed in a series of dramatic snapshots linked by pounding music, making it very much a play for today. The energy on stage is palpable and the casting is faultless in what, ostensibly, is the story of four misfits who steal a car for kicks.
Paul Simpson, Simon Greiff, Richard Oldham and Andres Salcedo are totally believable as the young offenders who take a drive with tragic consequences. James Low has a quiet authority as the caring probation officer, while Jim Pyke is the angry victim. However, this modern parable does more than reflect the increasing violence in our society - questioning who are the real victims in the Russian roulette of birth and circumstances. O'Connell is a remarkable new voice and the ferocious verbal assault of his language is reminiscent of the works of Berkoff or Godber. Incredibly, among all the searing pain of anger and self-loathing, there is much laughter.
Unfortunately, such is the reputation of this piece that Car has already practically sold out. But queue if you have to, for an unforgettable piece of theatre.
- Natalie Anglesey
Source
29/01/07
In this whirlwind 40 minute piece, performed with volcanic intensity by Graeme Hawley, theatergoers are thrust into the world of Dominic, a man grieving over the murder of his pre-teen daughter.
Grief, actually, is only one emotion that the man experiences as he attempts to integrate the reality of the murder into his pysche. Interestingly, O'Connell's lyrical play concurrently investigates the man's obsession with and addiction to the attention that he has received from the media following the crime and the guilt that he feels for having allowed his daughter to walk to a friend's house alone, simply because he wanted to spend an afternoon watching a movie on TV.
To accentuate the isolation and confusion that Dominic feels, lighting designer James Farncombe traps the character in two bars of light that form an x on the stage floor. As the play whirls from Dominic's home, (where his wife refuses to speak to him), to a pub where he demands that a reporter continue her coverage of his story, Hawley traverses the two bars of light like a caged animal as O'Connell allows audiences to slowly grasp both the backstory to the murder and its aftermath.
Fascinatingly and compellingly, Hawley navigates each hairpin turn in the script, lurching from Dominic's quiet complacency to near madness. Theatergoers will leave cloud:burst shaken, particularly given the exchange between father and daughter that gives the play its title:
"And I know what clouds do dad. They store fantastic things, right down, deep, tucked away, right at the bottom, in the corner."
"What sort of things?"
"Dreams. Don't let my cloud burst, will you dad?"
- Andy Propst
American Theater Web 31/05/2006
29/01/07
This world premiere of hard-hitting Coventry based playwright and director Chris O'Connell's latest offering is certainly not an easy watch. It focuses on the events before and after the death of tearaway Lenny Pope, exploring how bringing up a violent son altered his parents' relationship.
But it also looks at what turned Lenny into what he was - an angry young man into drugs who meets his untimely death at the hands of relatives of a girl whose death he was, at least indirectly, responsible for.
And this very physical play certainly pulls no punches. Peppered with strong language, violent scenes and references to drug abuse, it raises as many questions as it answers on what is causing society's problems today. There are quality performances from all four cast members, and the sparse set and simple lighting perfectly compliment the stark truth of how difficult modern parenting is.
Although the quick length does limit the scope of the play, much more would be hard to take and this is well worth checking out before Theatre Absolute take it to the rest of the UK.
- Andrew Heath
Coventry Telegraph 14/03/07 ****
17/03/07
Pithy and to the point, writer Chris O’Connell cuts straight to the heart of a dysfunctional family in this short but punchy new production for Theatre Absolute. This is hot on the heels of the company’s success with the award-winning Street Trilogy, Big Burger Chronicles and She’s Electric, also written by O’Connell.
Murdered son Lenny (Lee Colley) is already dead and yet he spends much of the time jumping in and out of his coffin in conversation with his father, played with great sensitivity and much soul searching by John Flitcroft. Striving to come to terms with his crimes, Lenny’s parents rake through the debris, trying to find where they went wrong. Were they really such bad parents, or was Lenny born bad?
Amanda Crossley plays weak Caroline, the down-trodden wife and long suffering mother. The relationship dynamic constantly changes between the three, who are sometimes supportive and caring but mostly destructive and in vain. Through their ordeal we experience a raw emotion that surfaces in an unsentimental and honest way. As the cracks in their marriage begin to widen, the family starts to fall apart. Whether it survives or not is for the audience to decide.
- Peta David
The Stage 15/03/07
17/03/07
The action unfolds in the Chapel of Rest in Brewer's Funeral Parlour in a small, declining industrial town. Caroline's husband Ray makes bespoke coffins. He is currently completing one for their son Lenny.
Lenny's death was inevitable. In his 24 years he had been a regular young offender, done a spell in prison and just about wrecked his parents' lives, though the five short periods of his childhood when his mother abandoned the family in an effort to assert her own identity must have had a traumatic effect.
Lenny boasts that being bad makes him feel good. And the public, especially his brothers, hold him responsible for the death of his girlfriend, Mia, which precipitates his own demise.
Immediately fantasy breaks in. The night before the funeral Lenny leaves his coffin and tries to persuade his father not to finish it, believing that as long as the lid is not in place he has some hope of escaping his fate. The narrative weaves between the current reality, the imaginary and flash backs.
At the same time Ray and Caroline seek some sign that they might rekindle their former relationship. Or will the damage Lenny did and recent events, deny them that? With an incisive text by Chris O'Connell, underscored by a soundscape, this gutsy but tender play unfolds in a minimal set dominated by the coffin.
Lee Colley bullies and wheedles as Lenny, a thoroughly objectionable young man who, as his mother recognises, could find no respect for any other human being. Amanda Crossley and John Flitcroft lacerate each other as Caroline and Ray, desperate for love and understanding but unlikely to ever find them, and Rachel Brogan plays Mia, who could have made something of her life if she hadn't met Lenny.
A gripping, emotionally raw hour of theatre.
Source
20/04/07
Northern Stage, Newcastle
Ray is making his last ever coffin. His firm is closing, his craftsmanship abandoned and his son is dead. Lenny is dead and the 'dead don't get second chances'. Murdered Lenny, his son who has created his own world of destruction and left the pieces scattered for his tormented parents to rebuild. Can the love that created their son enable them to let him go and find redemption? And can Lenny convince his father to give him one final gift? His belief.
The writer of the highly acclaimed trilogy (Car, Raw and Kid), Chris O'Connell has flipped his writing from the perspective of children to that of their parents in this uncomfortable and sobering play that explores the reality of parental struggle and blame that is never able to vanish, just constantly redistributed. The argument of nature versus nurture trickles through the play though as in life, never really able to be concluded. This, for the simple reason that the circumstances that lead to such contemplation are too dangerous to begin stripping ourselves of our barriers. Thus continuing confusion and blinding guilt cloud the truth and it is rarely ever found.
Hang Lenny Pope uses a simple set of white door frames and white chairs surrounding a wooden coffin with an unfinished lid and a dubious hammer strewn across it. With no 'walls', the space is open, empty and desolate. A jaunty song opens the show though the minimalist theme is continued with very few effects.
This near-to-blank canvas becomes magically enriched and brimming with imagery as O'Connell's words paint their beautiful pictures. This is theatre at its best. There are no gimmicks, no cheap shots, just wonderful words and glorious actors. The strong cast of four are thoroughly outstanding and completely grounded in O'Connell's compelling language, frantically dancing in and out of past and present with urgency for absolution.
At just over an hour, Hang Lenny Pope is a reminder that it is quality, not quantity that can transport us to another world and leave us breathless.
V Mitchell
The British Theatre Guide 24/04/07
24/04/07
A room dominated by a coffin sets the rather macabre scene for Chris O’Connell’s ‘Hang Lenny Pope’.
Accused of murdering his girlfriend, her family and friends have ganged up and beaten young Lenny Pope to death. The play explores the effect of this violent death on his parents - particularly his father, Ray - and their despair and bewilderment as they are forced to question why their child had become a violent and disaffected stranger.
As the evening progresses the causes become increasingly apparent as the Pope family try to find a meaning for Lenny’s behaviour, and a place to lay the blame. Each person in the tragedy, including the ‘body’ has a point of view, and the relationship between his parents - Ray and Caroline - already strained, now becomes the focus of the drama. Will they survive the loss of their ne’er-do-well son, or is this the final nail, not only in his coffin, but also in their marriage?
John Flitcroft gives a lovely central performance as Ray Pope, a man racked by guilt and grief, discovering how his relationship with his son had ultimately damaged them both. Sensitive support comes from Amanda Crossley as his wife, Caroline. Lee Colley gives Lenny a dark-edged and desperate humour, and Rachel Brogan makes the most of her cameo role as his girlfriend, Mia.
Written with sharp observational humour, despite its tragic subject matter, the play’s gradually accumulating tension draws the audience inexorably into the whirlpool of emotions swirling between the characters.
- Rod Dungate
Reviews Gate 20/05/07
26/05/07
Angered by tabloid headlines about the demons on our streets, former probation officer Chris O'Connell decided to write a street trilogy investigating what drives young people to crime and what chance they have of escaping such a lifestyle.
In 1999 he wrote a high octane play about car stealing, Car; in 2001 he followed it up with a searching play about female violence, Raw; and now he has rounded off the trilogy with Kid, which zooms in on a couple in their mid-twenties trying desperately to reform their lives.
The image of Zoe, heavily pregnant, smashing at the bulge where her unborn baby is waiting in order to put it out of its misery before it enters her world, is one that epitomises the sense of claustrophobic anger that drives the play.
O'Connell's gift is to articulate the frustrations of the inarticulate, and in Kid he skillfully illustrates the razor-thin division between Zoe's semi-reformed fiancé Lee and their former friend K, who seems permanently set on a course of self-destruction.
This is a poignant and fascinating piece, which raises significant and commendably unhysterical questions about crime. It reaffirms O'Connell as an important voice for the disaffected.
- Rachel Halliburton
London Evening Standard 21/08/03
20/01/07
ZOE AND LEE are about to have a baby. But first a few things need sorting out. Lee needs to keep out of trouble - which also means somehow keeping out of sight of the neighbours.
Zoe, meanwhile, has to cope with Bradley, her disruptive, damaged, hip hop loving 13-year-old sister, who refuses to return home to her parents and who is also undergoing an unusual crisis in gender. And both Zoe and Lee are nervously awaiting the arrival of K - Lee's old friend from the past, now out of prison, but for a long time also out of touch.
Kid is the third in a trilogy of plays from Theatre Absolute to premiere at the Fringe. Like Car and Raw before it is about people on the edge, dangerously adrift and dangerously unpredictable. And once again writer Chris O'Connell proves adept at articulating a particular inarticulate anger and frustration on stage. His characters don't talk to each other so much as shout and scream, in hot white language that says little, but in its sustained surface tension, conveys a lot.
Narrative is not the strong point of this production - it emerges as history halfway through, as K becomes the catalyst for a series of revelations about the singular relationship binding the three adults together.
Kid - a rather heavy metaphor for a play about the need to resolve the past in order to confront the future - is admirable for its powerfully integrated performances. If the storyline seems overly heavy on symbolism, director Mark Babych secures a redeeming visceral energy on stage. This is theatre from the gut - for the heart.
-Claire Allfree
Metro 20/08/03
20/01/07
Car and Raw, the previous two parts of Chris O'Connell's trilogy about young people growing up in Britain today, were both high energy but often low impact pieces of theatre whose ranting and raving often got in the way of the real emotion. Kid is a far more reflective show, and all the better for it. Not only are his kids growing up, but O'Connell is maturing as a writer too.
Lee and Zoe are expecting their first baby and have just moved into a new house. But rather than look forward happily to the birth the pair are eaten up with tension. Lee, after teenage and early adult years of crime and prison, is desperately trying to go straight, Zoe's 13-year-old sister who would really rather be a boy, has moved in with them, and now the past is coming back to haunt them in the shape of K, their former class-mate and Lee's best buddy. Quite who the title refers to, remains cleverly ambiguous.
By no stretch of the imagination is this an elegantly crafted play, but it is gripping drama, and, as always when O'Connell writes about the young and troubled, it has a whiff of authenticity. It is also very well acted in a production by Mark Babych that ratchets up the tension to good effect to tell a tight little story of how hard it is to grow up and face your responsibilities.
- Lyn Gardner
The Guardian 08/08/03
20/01/07
GIVEN last week's weather, and accentuated by the underground environs of the (slightly smelly) Pleasance Cavern, the atmosphere of oppressive summer heat conjured up in Kid explosively draws out confrontations and deep-seated fears in an urban, delinquent world.
Seething with denial and youthfulness, the play switches skillfully between the present and the past as the four characters wrestle with dark moments of crisis. This is the kind of theatre that grips you, bubbling with confidence, it is flawless and passionate.
Although it stands alone, Kid is the final instalment of a set of plays called the Street Trilogy from writer Chris O'Connell. These shows have flourished at the Edinburgh Festival since 1999, and it would seem bitterly unfair if this one failed to follow suit.
thrill: Becoming so involved you almost slip off your seat during the exciting bits. And, of course, the male nudity.
spill: Wishing you'd seen the previous shows, Car and Raw.
- Katy Monson
Fest 18/08/03
20/01/07
WHY THE KIDS ARE NOT ALL RIGHT
There is an incredible moment near the end of Chris O'Connell's latest play, Kid, when a heavily pregnant young mother realises that she cannot bear to bring her baby into the world of missed opportunities and crime that she inhabits.
The frustration and resentment that has been simmering up inside her throughout the drama spills over, as suddenly she begins to smash her fists at the bulge where her baby lies. It is a shocking symbol of a woman trying to save her child from the ditch of casual crime that has engulfed her all her life, only to realise that the more she struggles the more she seems to be dragged back. Following a boyhood of car-stealing and petty thieving, her fiancé, Lee, is attempting to get back on the straight and narrow but can't resist a little dodgy dealing, while the arrival of his friend K from jail threatens to take all three into far murkier waters.
Kid is the third play in O'Connell's blistering trilogy investigating what drives young people to crime. The rage of disaffected youth has recently provided the raw fuel for several of British theatre's successes - not least Elmina's Kitchen at the National and Flesh Wound at the Royal Court - but what marks O'Connell out is his emphasis on workshopping his plays with the help of the young people whose lives he chronicles.
"I was working heavily in the probation service in the mid-Nineties," he reveals in a bar on Shaftesbury Avenue, London, "and that was when the trilogy really began to develop in my head. The media is so obsessed with the idea of the demons on our streets, and I wanted to raise the debate about how people become entrenched in that criminal lifestyle."
Car, which won a Scotsman-awarded Fringe First and the Time Out Live award when it transferred to London, conveyed the high-octane excitement of stealing vehicles, and introduced O'Connell as a writer who could convincingly articulate the passions of the inarticulate. His second play, Raw, was a jagged investigation of female violence; a phenomenon that has begun to make headlines relatively recently, although O'Connell has been aware of it for a decade. "When I was writing Car, I was dealing with girls through the probation service who scared me just as much as the guys did. There was no point in suggesting that you might try to appeal to their essential nature as females - whichever sex they were, these kids had an agenda that was connected to being on the outside of society and dealing with life on those terms."
He tells an extraordinary story about the 18-year-old granddaughter of friends, who was beaten up by another girl in an unprovoked attack outside a nightclub. "As she was lying on the ground, the girl turned on her and said, 'You'll never forget the night that Tracey Smith beat the shit out of you.'" He also read about a woman who was mugged at knife-point. "All she could remember was two girls in tracksuits, with blonde hair and pretty faces - and the shock when they came up to her and pointed the knife."
Sometimes - no matter how good the play - there is a slight discomfort in watching dramas about people living on estates. It feels hypocritical to display an interest in the lives of the dispossessed while comfortably seated in an elitist environment. However, O'Connell's trilogy derives part of its power from refusing to aim for middle-class consumption. Perhaps one of the reasons he hasn't won greater recognition is his determination to do no more than chronicle what he has seen as a probation officer.
He concedes that there is a faintly idealistic aspect to his work. "I'm trying to pinpoint why crime is happening, and why people are becoming more and more afraid of the streets. There has to be some kind of vision in the way you redress that - and locking people away in prisons simply indicates a refusal to make serious investments in helping people turn their lives around."
The tragedy underpinning Kid is precisely how difficult it is for young people to transform their lives alone. "What I discovered in probation is that often when young offenders hit their mid-twenties they do want to straighten out. In my experience, for violent young men that can be triggered either by falling in love, or when they get someone pregnant. So many times I've heard boys say, 'I'm going to be a dad soon, I'm going to sort myself out.' But equally, some people can't begin to get themselves out of the rut, and it's by comparing two individuals in both those situations that I found a starting point for my play."
Asked why he hasn't focused more on the relationship between drugs and crime, O'Connell says: "Of course drugs go hand in hand with a lot of the themes I'm addressing, and that's implicit in my work, but I don't think it's necessarily interesting to concentrate on them. Equally, when I was touring with Car and showing it to a lot of boys who had been involved in car-stealing, one point that came up was that I hadn't shown enough police officers in my work, because in these kids' lives there are policemen banging on their doors 24 hours a day.
"But I want to fire their imaginations by focusing on their internal rather than their external landscape, and help them in that way to explore how they're living. That, for me, is the power of this work."
- Rachel Halliburton
The Independent 23/08/03
20/01/07
Since Theatre Absolute crashed into Edinburgh with Car in 1999, the company has been producing the kind of raw, high-energy theatre that, depending on your taste, either pumps you up or makes you want to lie down in a darkened room.
Raw initially conforms to the model. Lex and her crew trash an innocent commuter just for the fun of it, to a soundtrack of thundering train wheels overlaid with hip-hop. Lex and her posse are graffiti muggers, painting grannies faces and snatching their bags. They have no conscience and no shame, but as Lex begins to direct her brutality towards gang members, it becomes clear that she is out of control.
Chris O'Connell's script is far more subtle that it initially appears. Among the predictable revelations of abuse and abandonment, something more interesting emerges: a desperate belief in rituals and talismans that Lex and her friends use as a kind of protection against a world that has let them down.
The young cast give brave performances, and the production is cleverly paced, knowing when to pitch itself at the the top, or lower the volume.
- Lyn Gardner
The Guardian - 21/08/01
20/01/07
Raw comes at you hard, the attack of a hip-hop track merging into the deafening noise of a train hurtling past, windows flickering at speed. Inside, three members of a teen gang are heading towards catastrophe as their leader, Lex, (Jo Joyner), compulsively repeating a phrase which matches the train's rhythm but we cannot make out, suddenly launches into a brutal attack on a drunken tramp. From here, things are always at breaking point.
Raw, by 1999 Fringe First winners Theatre Absolute, is a riveting portrait of young lives on the edge: refusing to be controlled by society, but struggling to keep control themselves. Words are hissed and truncated, whispered and desperate. Quiet impassiveness alternates with explosions of decision and violence. One gang member, Lorna, (a terrific stage debut by Clare Corbett), is a mass of twitches and accelerated speech that is almost unbearable to watch. In this atavistic world, the teenagers use rituals and talismans to hold themselves together, and Lex's bursts of violence come to seem like sacrifices.
But this is no crude horror show. Joyner's subtle performance as Lex shows us a young woman haughty, vicious and bewildered, her severity masking a mind in a maze of past abuse. When she finally begins to talk about herself, we come to see that the adolescent's magical thinking is a desperate response to cruelty.
Mark Babych's fluent direction keeps the sharply cut scenes moving, and Dominie Hooper's metallic set evokes the coldness of a modern commercial city. Most of all, it is Andy Garbi's extraordinary soundscape that co-ordinates the assault. This is a production of haunting sounds: the strangulated voices of the teenagers, the sound of a doorbell echoing around their hideout, the crash of a head against a filing cabinet and the urgent bass of Garbi's high-volume music shaking your body like the violent energy which powers and troubles these lives.
- Stephen Brown
The Scotsman 07/08/01
29/01/07
Can you ever get into the head of a vicious young thug? And can empathy with some of society's losers help them get their lives together? In Chris O'Connell's bruising new play, the aptly titled Raw, a teen girl gang led by the fiercesome Lex, gets into a spiral of trouble which leaves one innocent train passenger badly beaten and spells danger for the whole posse.
With a deft touch, O'Connell gives a graffiti picture of this girl gang: the gobby leader, Lex, rules over her two underlings, Trainers, a streetsmart yes-woman, and Lorna, a disturbed teen who acts as if she's a couple of peas short of a full pod. Together, they terrorise the neighbourhood, robbing people, beating them up, spray painting tags all over the walls. No surprises here.
But when Lex falls out with Trainers, the trouble escalates. Lex beats her up so badly that she has an epileptic fit, and an unexpectedly tender side of Lex emerges as she tries to resuscitate her best friend. Then, as Trainers is packed off to hospital to have her broken teeth repaired, Lex meets Rueben - a youth worker whose mission is to help any teens that come his way.
At first, I thought Raw would be spoiled by O'Connell's tendency to write like a didactic liberal: the young are almost ridiculously aggressive and awful, and the saintly social worker has a heart of gold. For several perilous minutes, in this fast moving and vibrant drama, it looked as if Rueben would manage to persuade Lex to give up her evil old ways and take the path of sensible reform.
But no. Mercifully, a sense of reality reasserts itself and Lex finally turns on Rueben and gives the man a beating. Lex ends the play as she began it, feeling invincible, commanding absolute loyalty from her cronies, and only dimly aware of how her violent background affects her everyday actions. She knows she's uncontrollable, but she can't stop. At one point, she gets so angry, she stops breathing and falls into a faint.
Like his previous play, Car, O'Connell's drama raises questions but doesn't offer any simple answers. Unlike the agitprop plays of yesteryear, there's no easy solution that can be presented to the audience wrapped in a nice pastel-coloured ribbon. But this refusal to give solutions, however laudable, also poses a problem. Is it irresponsible to stage plays that dramatise violence but cannot offer even a glimmer of hope?
O'Connell's play is both psychologically truthful and dramatically staged - it reminds us of a social problem that only a right wing tub-thumper would say is easy to solve. So although it offers no sense of any solution, the mere fact that Rueben does try to reach out and help Lex is a gesture that implies that even in the most awful circumstances - people still behave in a humane way.
Oddly enough, the show is so loud, its music so doomy, and its young cast so energetic in their portrayal of teen criminals on the skids, that you almost forget that there is a note of hope, an inkling of the possibility of change, right there at the centre of the piece.
In the end, it is a curious fact that we still go to the theatre in both the hope of finding a solution to social problems, and with a grim suspicion that the solution might not exist.
- Aleks Sierz
Tribune 22/03/02
29/01/07
Let's just draw breath a minute. Think about life. Life on the street. Think. Really think about what it means to have to make your own world, your own rules, create your own responsibilities. Why shouldn't she do what she wants to? It's obvious that no one else really cares - well cares enough to take her aside, to really look after her, to really give her the breaks she needs...
And what about her mates? At her beck and call day and night. A strange control she has over them. Why do they stay? Why do they put up with it? How can they stand by and watch her destroying herself by destroying other people?
In the cold grey room that is home, they do their counts. They plan their next attack. It goes too far. It had to happen. In an atmosphere of adrenalin kicks, the graffiti artist comes up with a new twist - spraying faces. Not friendly shapes, but making a mess of people's faces...
How low can you go? Can you attack a drunken youth on a train? Can you smack your best mate's head against a table - several times? Can you rule your mates by fear? Can you tell someone your innermost secrets? Can you tell someone how much you miss love?
To many of you reading this, life in the raw is something read about in papers or seen in worthy documentaries on the television. But what happens when the fabric of your life breaks down, leaving neither warp nor weft to hold your relationship with your fellows? Chris O'Connell's Raw, for Theatre Absolute, lifts the lid off the assumptions and hits hard, very hard, with a view of urban and individual decay. Today. Here. In this country.
This is a powerful piece that owes as much to the actors, as to the script. It is not just theatre; it is well placed, well timed social comment.
- Richard Hollingum
The Oxford Times 03/05/02
29/01/07
Car
THE first part of Theatre Absolute's Street Trilogy, which also includes Raw and Kid, Car is a frantically powerful, emotionally-draining and intelligently questioning piece of work which, like the rest of this remarkable set of plays, portrays the vulnerable and the violent as they lash out against the world around them.
It starts off with the adrenaline-fuelled anarchy of a car theft by a group of four desperate lads, including Nick (Peter Ash), Jason (Lee Colley), Tim (Dan Harcourt) and Mark (Sean Cernow).
Then Nick decides to give himself up to his probation officer Robert (James Low), who arranges for him to meet Gary (Graeme Hawley), the injured and angry victim of their crime.
Gritty, provocative and full of startling narrative developments and emotional U-turns, Car is played at breakneck speed and yet its tragic conclusion possesses remarkable resonance for such a short, sharp piece.
Some of the same actors, who are all excellent, also appear in Raw, the second play in the trilogy, where the ritualised violence of street gangs goes terribly wrong, and in the trilogy's final part Kid, where a new beginning is offered by an unborn child, if only its young parents can somehow escape their own dead-end lives.
Uncompromising and unsentimental, the Street Trilogy has an extraordinary raw vitality that can be overwhelming.
Kevin Bourke
Manchester Evening News 16/03/2005
29/01/07
Julia Negus and Chris O'Connell founded Theatre Absolute in 1992 with the intention of producing uncompromising and contemporary theatre with heightened narratives. This has proved to be a winning combination and since that time they have won two Scotsman Fringe Firsts at the Edinburgh Festival for Outstanding New Work and a Time Out Live Award for Best New Play on the Fringe.
Street Trilogy which consists of three separate plays entitles Car, Raw and Kid tackles the ever burgeoning problem in Britain of youth crime and victimisation. The projecy began in 1999 with Chris O'Connell writing from personal experience having worked within the probation service in Coventry during the 1990s.
Each play has been acclaimed individually for O'Connell's insightful writing and Mark Babych's clear, precise direction. The violence is shocking, the pain palpable, the sense of hopelessness nullifying, until you reach the final chapter with the imminent birth of a child symbolising new beginnings. On the surface you see nothing that you don't already know. Look beyond and you are watching the ritualistic behaviour of a generation that is offered nothing more than unemployment and deprivation and the result of abandonment, abuse and victimisation. You witness their futile struggle trying to make sense of their existence, and their never-ending fight to escape the spiralling situation that traps them in a life that will destroy any positive future.
The performances are extraordinary - in particular Samantha Power, Rebekah Manning and Rachel Brogan. The direction is concise, the writing thought-provoking and for any television producer, a brilliant way of re-launching a season of Plays for Today allowing a wider audience to experience drama in the raw.
Peggy Leader, What's On
What's On ***** 16.2.05
29/01/07
In each of the three plays by Chris O'Connell's Street Trilogy, the starting point is a crime too far: a single, horrific deed that drives petty offenders to reconsider their lives. Against an uneven grey backdrop reminiscent of high-rise concrete, his characters quiz 'respectable' people for answers and grope in vain for alternatives, only for redemption to fade away in the distance.
The first and best of the three, Car, sees four young men nick software engineer Gary's Golf, then run him down with it. In the guilty aftermath, one offender is driven to meet with Gary under the auspices of his probation officer, Robert. The adrenaline-driven lives of the deliquents flash by in short scenes riddled with violence and intoxicants. Meanwhile, in the calm of Robert's office, a more thoughtful drama unfurls, whipped along byt he middle-class outrage of Graeme Hawley's bumbling Gary.
Similar in style is Raw, in which youth worker Reuben becomes obsessed with the mystically charismatic Lex, the ultra-violent leader of a gang of mugger graffiti artists. Rachel Brogan is great as Lex, but the dearth of humour marks this out as a slightly weaker sibling.
The third tale, Kid, comes as a change - slower and more conventional as, in quasi-tragic mode, O'Connell poses and solves the riddle behing a couple's fraught relationship with a bullying childhood buddy.
All of which adds up to five hours of deliquency and spiralling guilt: a numbing experience should you watch them consecutively. But the fine acting, keenly conscientious writing and flashes of dramatic brilliance make each play a fine example of the gutsy theatre that feels most alive on the fringe.
Kieron Quirke, Metro
Metro ****
29/01/07
A WIFE-BEATING car thief tries to cut his wrist with a Stanley knife. A gang leader savagely assaults a drunk train passenger. A young wife thrusts her fists into her pregnant bulge. The characters in this touring trilogy, by the Coventry-based former probation officer Chris O’Connell, may have their whole lives before them but little will to make much of them.
In Car, first seen in 1999, a gang of car thieves falls apart in a stew of guilt, drug-frazzled helplessness and suicidal depression. Repentant car-jacker Nick, with his probation officer, meets his victim, a family man who shows that pent-up frustration exists on both sides of the law.
In Raw (2001), 18-year-old Lex nearly kills a man during another graffiti and mugging spree, then turns on her idolising gang. Despite the efforts of a youth worker and her sister, Lex refuses to be controlled by society while being unable to control herself.
Both plays are driven by anger, accelerated speech, poeticised street slang and pensive moments of self-awareness while urban sounds bleed into pounding techno beats. But while this hyperactive approach conveys the restless agitation of O’Connell’s characters, suggestions of abuse and abandonment are not enough to give deeper significance to all the aggression, arrogant body language and shouting matches that rip through each play.
Janet Vaughan’s metal set, evoking an urban coldness, is softened by a trellis and garden gate for Kid (2003). It’s a more reflective drama and all the more effective for it.
Twentysomething Zoe is carrying Lee’s unborn child, conceived in anger and despair after they witnessed Lee’s best friend K kill a lad in a drunken rage. A year on, in their new home, she’s trying to disentangle Lee from his criminal past, while K comes back into their lives after a kind of redemptive exile in Central America.
A sense of struggling to grow up and take on responsibility gives the play a welcome emotional weight. There is also the pathetic figure of Zoe’s unwanted 13-year-old sister, Bradley, trying to get noticed as a would-be boy rapper.
Samantha Power, showing doglike devotion to Rachel Brogan’s troubled Lex in Raw, exudes determination and hopelessness as Zoe in Kid while Rebekah Manning, a babbling bundle of nerves as one of Lex’s crew, makes a touching Bradley trying to fit in. Peter Ash is all steely scowls as car thief Nick but a lost boy in Lex’s gang.
The performances are strong in all three of Mark Babych’s productions. They capture the thrill-seeking desperation of a young underclass even when the plays fail to examine what lies behind their unruly disaffection.
Ian Johns, The Times
The Times ***
29/01/07
In keeping with Chris O'Connell's monosyllabic titleling of the constituent plays in his 1999-2003 trilogy, my abbreviated verdict is: Not Too Bad. Seeing all three one-act pieces in sequence for the first time, though, shows that O'Connell's work could be appropriated for the opposite agenda from the one towards which he inclines.
"A whirlwind of crime has ripped through the modern world," O'Connell hyperbolises in his introduction to the published texts. (The reality is that crime itself has been far outstripped by our fear of it.) So, in Car, four lads nick a car for a joyride; two of them take it over a cliff, a third cracks up, the fourth confronts the vehicle's implacable owner in a mediation session. In Raw, attempts to persuade a female teenage gangleader to pull back from terminal psychopathy fail as she persists in indulging her impulses towards ultra-violence. In Kid, Zoe and Lee try to go straight for the sake of their unborn child, try to get clear of the shadow of Lee's best friend K who killed a man (like Johnny Cash's character in the song) just to see him die, and try to prevent Zoe's gender-dysphoric younger sister from going bad.
Car remains as unsatisfying for me as on first viewing five years ago: it tries too hard to be virtually non-stop loud, fast and hard, self-consciously in-yer-face. Kid is an interesting and thoughtful final modulation into territory between the street and the domestic. I found Raw the richest, although also most erratic in its register and approach. There is no real explanation of why the mysterious older figure of Reuben (Graeme Hawley) intervenes to try to redeem Lex; with his combination of bulk and inscrutability, he comes over as a kind of martial Zen figure out of a Kurosawa or Leone film. Rachel Brogan is excellent as Lex, aware of the strange workings in her head but seeing no hope in devoting effort to disentangling them.
It is easy to see the progression in O'Connell's writing ability through the trilogy (although he never quite manages to integrate set-piece speeches or exchanges with the scene around them). Yet although the trilogy is overall non-judgmental, there comes a point in each play where it is averred that some people simply are wrong'uns who, for whatever reason, are unsalvageable, and that we can only expend so much energy on them. As a former probation officer, O'Connell knows this is only one element in a complex picture. But as the law-and-order rhetoric ratchets up, I worry that this could be misrepresented as arguing that there's no point even trying to rehabilitate or redeem such malefactors. It would be a pity if these increasingly accomplished plays were so traduced.
Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times
Financial Times
29/01/07
Theatre Absolute has never been a company to pull its punches, and its latest work Zero is no exception.
The hard hitting drama is set in a futuristic prison camp where inmates are brutally interrogated for information (similiarities with Guantanamo Bay are inevitable), and an unlikely alliance is formed between translator Alex (the excellent Stephen Hudson) and newly stationed squaddie Tom (played by a charismatic Daniel Hoffmann-Gill, "isn't it?").
The former has borne witness to the degrading torture of detainees - one scene literally turned the auditorium cold - and wants to speak out, but it's no easy task.
Nor is watching Chris O'Connell's compelling play, especially during the chaotic opening when all characters speak at once. But beyond the violence (none of which is explicit) and constant tension there is a real heart to this piece, most notably in the developing relationship between stiff-upper lipped Alex and working class lad Tom.
Each character is brilliantly fleshed out and performed to ensure you live through the nightmare with them.
**** Steve Adams
Coventry Times 9/10/08
09/10/08
Coventry playwright Chris O'Connell and his company Theatre Absolute built their reputation on raw, punchy dramas and their latest certainly continues that tradition.
But whereas pieces like the Car trilogy dealt with alienated youth in contemporary society, Zero takes a wider world-view and reflects on where the war on terror might have taken us 20 years into the future. The war is now being waged on behalf of something called the Global Economic Alliance against an enemy identified only as 'the others'. With terrorist attacks at epidemic levels, scruples about the use of torture have evidently been further relaxed.
Two naive recruits turn up at a Guantanamo Bay style facility called Camp Zero. Tom is a private who has signed up for adventure in the time honoured tradition, while Alex, an officer, is here to act as an interpreter between prisoners and their interrogators. Their story is told retrospectively after they have gone on the run, apparently carrying a book in which Alex has documented the abuses, including murder disguised as suicide, he has witnessed. Written in O'Connell's familiar stripped-down style, integrated with an edgy electronic score by Andy Garbi, it has a visceral power which is counterbalanced by the odd and sometimes comic relationship of Tom and Alex.
Though fellow fugitives, they are far from being on the same wavelength. While Alex has been shocked out of his shallow pragmatism, Tom's instincts are far more self-centred, more inclined to swing towards the course of action which at one particular moment seems likeliest to restore things to normality.
This relationship, which draws exceptional performances from Daniel Hoffmann-Gill and Stephen Hudson, gives foreground depth to what might otherwise seem an overly-schematic play. And it is perhaps interesting, given current news events, that O'Connell seems to root his bleak future in globalisation and the reaction to its effects, rather than religious or political ideologies.
*** Terry Grimley
Birmingham Post 2/10/08
09/10/08
Violent and dark, this play does not make for an easy night out, but it does make for a thought-provoking one.
Zero is a hard hitting, fast and furious production exploring the ethics of torture in a chaotic world.
Under the leadership of city writer Chris O’Connell and director Matt Aston, Coventry-based Theatre Absolute delivers an intense and uncompromising drama centred on doomed characters facing a battle with their conscience.
The play resisted the temptation to offer a biased account and left me feeling sympathy for both the wardens and prisoners in the camps who had committed atrocious crimes.
Set 20 years in the future, the play imagines a world where wealthy societies use torture camps to protect their interests – at any cost – from those who aim to blow it apart.
At this one particular camp – Zero – Alex, a lieutenant translator, decides he wants to let the world know “the story” about the camp’s gruesome activities but, by doing so, puts his own life in danger.
The play poses the idea that capitalism is slowly ripping the heart out of us, and reducing us to savages and I certainly walked away with a lot to think about.
A gripping piece of theatre. ****
Christina Savvas
Coventry Telegraph
Coventry Telegraph 2/10/08
09/10/08
Zero is a powerful drama that investigates the cycle of violence in which a state's actions to defeat terrorism are so oppressive that they inspire others to become terrorists. It is set in the near future where suicide bombings are epidemic and huge numbers of suspects are held in detention camps. Writer Chris O'Connell has made an interesting twist on the terrorism plot: in this future vision it is not Islamism that inspires the bombers, but poverty and the envy of wealth apparently resulting from globalisation.
The story follows two soldiers who arrive at Camp Zero. Alex, played by the excellent Stephen Hudson, is a level-headed, educated translator who is shocked at the torture inflicted on the prisoners and who begins to understand that this treatment is part of the cause of the violence. Tom, on the other hand, is a new recruit who has signed up for the adventure and who initially accepts the raison d'être of the camp unquestioningly. Alex decides that he must reveal the truth about the torture to the public by writing a book. His only ally is the unreliable Tom and with bombings occurring everywhere there is no guarantee that anyone will want to listen. As the government try to prevent the book leaving the camp, Alex and Tom are forced to run for their lives and a dramatic endgame ensues.
This play includes torture scenes that are shocking but true-to-life and not over-played, benefitting from the amazing directorial skills of the Lakeside's Matt Aston. Comic relief is provided by Tom's bumbling good humour and childish naivety. Tom is superbly played by Daniel Hoffman-Gill, who happens to be a former LeftLion contributor. Tom represents the ignorance and complacency of the public, providing a poignant contrast to Alex, who is shocked out of his military sense of detachment by the illogical brutality.
This is a compelling contribution to the debate on governments' reaction to terrorism. However, I feel there are a couple of weaknesses. Firstly, whilst the writer's position is clear, he has a duty to convey the alternate point of view. Although the camp's major does ask whether there are situations where torture is acceptable, this line is not explored. Secondly, the scene in which a detainee explains that it is economic inequality and envy that drove him to buy explosives rather than tools, is rather unconvincing. Failing to address these points means the play risks preaching only to the converted. However, it makes a powerful case why we should all pay attention to what is being done in our names.
Adrian Bhagat
LeftLion Magazine, Nottingham
14/10/08
Set in a dystopian near-future, Zero poses the problem of survival on a micro and macro scale. The Global Economic Alliance has created a society where its willing participants are rich and successful, but where the victims of its economic apartheid are driven to acts of terrorist violence to express their frustration and anger.
More than 500 camps exist to extract information from those disenfranchised by society – extraction by torture. Into one such camp come Tom (Daniel Hoffmann-Gill), a squaddie who signed up to get back at the ‘scum’ who’ve been responsible for the deaths of his friends, and Alex (Stephen Hudson), a translator (and lieutenant) who has drifted into the job. What they find frightens and appals them, driving them to act against the regime.
While Tom’s rebellion is born out of a lack of understanding, Alex takes a moral stance that puts him at serious odds with his immediate colleagues and superiors. The camp commander Major Chaudry (Abdel Akhtar) and the sinister, pregnant interrogator Helen (Kate Ambler) face Alex down with their own moral arguments for torture and protecting their way of life at any cost. Completing the characters is Demissie (Damian Lynch) – a prisoner being interrogated who has his own particular reasons for having acted against the system.
The parallels with current events at Guantanamo Bay and Orwell’s 1984 are clear throughout this splendidly realised play. Strong performances from all participants – particularly Daniel Hoffmann-Gill as the bemused / angry / homesick Tom, and Stephen Hudson as the impotent but outraged Alex – create believable characters driven by realistic motives. The major question of clashing moral standpoints is left unresolved as individuals attempt to fight a system that is convinced of its own correctness.
A stark set and invasive sound create and maintain an atmosphere of tension and oppression and Matt Aston is to be congratulated on his strong direction of this thought provoking play. Theatre Absolute continues to produce excellent work – much of it written by Chris O’Connell – well into their second decade. This production demonstrates that strong characterisation and energetic performance combine to present excellent, though-provoking theatre for their audiences.
Simon Berry, 17/10/08
Oxford Daily 16/10/08
17/10/08
Theatre Absolute & Warwick Arts Centre have come together to bring "Zero" by Chris O'Connell to the Citizens Circle Studio. Set in 2028 it takes place in Camp Zero - a detention centre for the interrogation of 'The Others' - perceived threats to the Global Economic Alliance. While the play does ask us to consider the ethical implications of torture, its real core is the impact that witnessing it has on camp translator Alex.
O'Connell's decision to move the setting on from the present day is a clever one. There is nothing here that could be called futuristic and the issues are very much of the present. But he enables us to jettison the baggage of our current conflicts and the simplicity of the fictional conflict provides little distraction.
As Alex, Stephen Hudson delivers a phenomenal performance as we see him deteriorate from someone very much in control to a man on the brink. Not an uncommon event in theatre, but what makes his performance so extraordinary is that O'Connell's script and Matt Aston's direction calls for scenes in different timeframes to be quickly intercut. Daniel Hoffman-Gill as army grunt Tom also handles the demands of the script well, although the character's journey is perhaps not so far as Alex's. It's largely the relationship between these two characters and the performances of the two actors that make the play work so well.
O'Connell's use of language is impressive including powerful moments when detainees are read their non-rights. There are also a number of effective set piece moments in here - particularly the DVD messages home and the impressively portrayed scenes where Demissie (Damian Lynch) is interrogated. But there are other aspects that didn't quite work for me such as the relationship between interrogator Helen and the commander (despite good performances from Kate Ambler & Adeel Akhtar).
As an 'issue' play it doesn't attempt to offer any answers, or even ask any new questions, but as a character study this is a forceful piece of theatre.
View From The Stalls 9/11/08
13/11/08
It's 20 years from now and the world is divided into the member states of the Global Economic Alliance and the dismissively termed Others. Such is the tension between these factions that hundreds of camps have been built for the internment of suspected terrorists, not only on the ground but also in aircraft, perpetually in flight, and in ships. It is to one such facility, Camp Zero, located in a desert, that Alex, a translator, and Tom, a naive army recruit, are dispatched. Alex is pragmatic, his intention simply to do his part in the unpleasant but necessary business of protecting the alliance; Tom, ten times bereaved by the terrorist attacks, is fuelled by boyish excitement and the promise of vengeance. Neither is prepared for the savagery that awaits.
Chris O’Connell’s new play, presented by his Theatre Absolute company, is noisy, chaotic and as subtle as a jackboot to the crotch. But it has urgency and intelligence, and Matt Aston’s sweaty, hard-edged production grips. In this dystopian near-future, the wellspring of hatred is the wealth gap. O’Connell avoids dwelling on the historical and religious causes of conflict, and so oversimplifies. Instead, he depicts a world polluted by brutality, its inhabitants dehumanised by rampant capitalism; and air, sea and land all contaminated by the camps that symbolise hatred and division.
He also raises the issue of censorship: horrified by the torture he not only witnesses but in which he is forced to participate, Alex plans to tell all in a book and, with Tom, flees the camp. But will anyone want to listen? The evocation of control by propaganda and fear is almost Orwellian.
An opposing view is offered by the ruthless realpolitik of the camp’s general and a pregnant female interrogator, whose willing espousal of techniques designed to terrify, agonise and humiliate is motivated by her determination to make the world safe for her unborn child, her natural maternal instinct corrupted by unnatural economic and political systems.
The argument is less rigorous than it could be, because those characters are underwritten – as is the suspect with whom Alex unsuccessfully attempts to make a connection. Still, Aston’s staging, with its oppressive sound and lighting and its stylised violence, delivers the play’s punch despite its dialectical drawbacks. There are strong performances from Stephen Hudson as Alex, driven from complacency to action and the edge of madness, and from Daniel Hoffmann-Gill as greenhorn Tom.
- Sam Marlowe
The Times 17/11/08
17/11/08
With a cast of only five, production company Theatre Absolute present their latest offering Zero at The Tristan Bates Theatre. Set twenty years from now in a world of terrorist anarchy, it follows the frustration, and futile efforts of Alex, a translator in Camp Zero as he tries to expose the inhumane torture regimes he is unwillingly a party to. Stephen Hudson puts in an energetic performance as the protagonist , whilst Daniel Hoffman Gill is equally impressive as Tom, his subordinate, and as it emerges only friend. Though initially Tom appears almost childlike in his naivety, his character surprises as he becomes increasingly insightful as the play progresses. Major Chaudry (Adeel Akhtar) and Syrah (Kate Ambler) represent the destructive force they’re up against, with Desimmie (Damien Lynch) the terrorist Alex fleetingly befriends.
Writer Chris O’Connell gives each character the opportunity to promote their cause leaving the audience empathising at points with all. There’s Alex, the intellect torn between his moral conscience and sense of duty, and with it, burdened by guilt. Is this the reason he wants to out the truth? A selfish need to redeem himself as Demissie is quick to suggest? Demissie, in a mitigating speech explains why he is imprisoned at Camp Zero; because he car bombed a businessman who had brought him custom. Why, asks Alex in sheer exasperation. He is one of the few to ask that question Demissie points out. Why? Because, like so many of his neighbours, so many in his social position, he was blinded by anger, bitterness and seething hatred towards the unattainably wealthy. Major Chaudry is simply brainwashed by his belief in the system whilst Syrah feels it’s the only alternative. There is no prevention, only cure.
The play reaches its climax when Alex tries to escape the camp armed only with a self penned book documenting his experience and the abuse of human rights behind the prison walls. He, and Tom who goes along for the ride, are desolate in the wilderness; exhausted, hungry and fighting for survival. Without giving it away the ending itself suggests their fate was inevitable. They’re indeed helpless and hapless in equal measure leaving the audience saddened for them and the situation as a whole, but at the same time, hardly surprised.
A minimal set piece, and simplistic lighting perhaps to consciously convey the austerity of the prison entrusts the play in an excellent script to carry the story forward. The subject matter though heavy is punctuated with moments of light comic relief making the running time of approximately one hour and forty minutes pass easily. Overall then Zero, with its small yet talented cast, and be it creative team, is a thoroughly engaging, excellent play that may strike an uneasy chord with some as they realise it prophesises a future not so far from the truth.
Cavelle Leigh
Totally Theatre 18/11/08
18/11/08