At Sgript Cymru |
| Sgript Cymru | Paines Plough- Crazy Gary's Mobile Disco , Chapter Arts Centre, cardiff , March 5, 2001 |
| I’ve been obsessed with monologues for what seems months now - in fact it is months - as I have been editing a collection for Parthian Books (One Man One Voice - out April!) and have become fascinated with how the single-voice drama expresses our very postmodernist concern with identity and how it raises the question of the reliability of the narrator. In my collection I had to ask to what extent I believed the stories told by Ted John (from Ed Thomas’s Envy), Burton (from Mark Jenkins’s Playing Burton), Alex (Ian Rowlands’s Marriage of Convenience), Eileen (Frank Vickery’s Sleeping with Mickey) and Lee (Roger Williams’s Saturday Night Forever) - some of whom really thought they were telling the truth, some of whom were patently fantasising and some were somewhere in between. The most familiar of unreliable narrators are probably some of Alan Bennett’s tv Talking Heads but we’ve seen a Welsh success with Rob Brydon's Marion and Geoff. In literature, Pooter stands out. In the movies, Kevin Spacey’s character in The Usual Suspects is a classic (in fact the film held fewer surprises for me because I had already got into the idea of the unreliable narrator). In brief, we now don’t really trust anyone to tell us the truth because we suspect there is no such thing as the truth - only different versions of it. This is deeply cynical and reminiscent of Baudrillard’s infamous postmodernist assertion that the Gulf War did not exist. Try telling that to bereaved loved ones, one thought, even if you did sort of know what he meant. Gary Owen’s first play, premiered in Cardiff though developed by London-based new writing company Paines Plough, consists of three monologues delivered one after the other by a man who runs a disco, a man who wants to be a cabaret singer and a man who wants to escape his life. All three are unreliable narrators but we do actually believe the last - because his story is the one that enables us to make sense of the other two (indeed, all three) and the one which, crucially, gives meaning to the play. The first, confusingly called Gary (David Rees Talbot), presents himself as hard man, a smooth operator, irresistible to women, with a good line in wit, and the champion of Welsh working-class common sense. We realise in no time that he is a violent repulsive insensitive sexist bully as he tells us how he is about to fuck the fittest chick in the whole wide bastard world (I quote, because the programme is also the play text) and that is how the play will end. The second, Matthew Melody (Steven Meo), tells us about his beloved Candy, about his troubles at the dole office and the neighbour’s cat, and about how he wins the karaoke competition. With no little discomfort we recognise him as someone mentally ill, with a tenuous grasp on reality, living in sheltered accommodation, whose precious Candy wants him only for his drug prescription. The third, Russell (Richard Mylan), is a little different: a man with a chip on his shoulder, sexist, articulate, determined he’s leaving his partner and the town. But more than the other two, what you see is what you get. Russell’s story may, of course, be as fictional or as self-deceptive as the other two. But it makes sense. As Russell’s monologue moves on we realise that the other two were not, as we wrongly supposed, unrelated. When Gary beats up a karoke host and forces him to leave his local pub so that Gary’s disco can be reinstated, the contest is curtailed so that the bald crooner called Matthew wins; when Gary chats up a gorgeous girl at a party it turns out to be Russell’s disaffected partner; when Gary then beats up her boyfriend who takes her away from the party, the victim is Russell. And Russell recognises Crazy Gary as the one-time school bully, the obnoxious tough kid who had humiliated two younger and weaker boys, one of whose mind flipped and one who had lived with the guilt ever since. And Russell decides to expiate his guilt, to atone for the damage done to Matthew, to foreclose… So Crazy Gary was wrong, the play does not end with him "pulling the perfect girl". In an unusually non-postmodernist twist, we find that maybe people do not behave randomly, purposelessly, in some amoral meaningless world between signifier and signified: with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, people are like they are because of events and other people and Crazy Gary’s Mobile Disco ends up being an old-fashioned revenge tragedy. It is a very neat idea for a play and it does work remarkably well. It’s written in a manic South Walian street lyricism about an apparently meaningless world, one shared by Ed Thomas and James Hawes and Twin Town, but one that only makes sense when you have the whole story. The characters grab you, as they have to in monologues, and Owen succeeds surprisingly in engaging us for much of the time - there are too many anecdotes, an excess of in-yer-face calculated offensiveness. But Vicky Featherstone’s direction rarely flags and each performer has great presence. A bit of a marathon - but worth it. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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