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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