Review Jam

A troubling school reunion gives reviewer Peter Barker plenty of food for thought on bread-and-butter school issues.  

Jam
by Matt Parvin

Class War
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk

Matt Parvin’s impressive debut full length play Jam is an intense two-hander charting a sometimes funny, sometimes ugly classroom relationship which should have ended a decade before on school leaving day. 

Former pupil Kane McCarthy (Harry Potter's Harry Melling) unexpectedly and uninvited visits his former teacher Bella Soroush (Jasmine Hyde) in an English rural comprehensive.

He's now a bit of a drifter whose words can't be trusted. He turns up with a rucksack filled with schoolday relics, - plus a bottle of vodka and a baseball bat. All of which Bella goes through methodically, as if it's back to the rebellious student and the schoolmarm emptying his bag.

Kane admits he was a bit of a twat, aggressive and abusing Bella over her Iranian heritage. Nevertheless this seems like a diversion from the deeper reason why Bella is just not acceptable to Kane and he is marked by his schooldays. 

For the past is not another country in Parvin's play - they don't do things differently there. The present repeats the past. These two are locked, however unwillingly, in a toxic relationship.
 
And the cryptic title Jam? It's not clarified in the play but Parvin's past work includes an adaptation of Alice In Wonderland during his own student days may give a clue.

Lewis Carroll's  White Queen pronounces, "The rule is, jam to-morrow, jam yesterday - but never jam to-day.", later coopted by economist John Maynard Keynes and various politicians of all hues.
 
Melling is immensely credible as West Country misfit Kane who is just not that clever. His explosions of rage are visceral, if sometimes with a little too much volume for such a small performance space.

The presence of Hyde's Bella pays dividends later on in the play when her frailties and flaws are exposed.

Her self-control and her controlling personality are brought into context as the script and Hyde's performance reveal the rawness of her emotions and her capability for violence.

An ingenious scaffold climbing frame design from Emma Bailey splits the performing space in two cleverly suggesting a room and a playground.  Alexandra Faye Braithwaite's soundscape subtly
mingles the murmurs of an outside world with the obligatory ringing of school bells.

Playwright Parvin and director Tommo Fowler, could afforded to cut at least quarter of an hour from the running time of 95 minutes, tightening the script and ratcheting up the tension.

Even so, the writer proves adept at building and then releasing tension. Yet Jam has a conclusion that is anything but a release of suspense but a surprising and skilful collapse into exhaustion. It's a green light for a thought-provoking classroom drama.

Review Diary Of A Madman

Diary of A Madman 
By Al Smith
Adapted from the short story of Nikolai Gogol

I'm Not All Right Jock
http://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/http://www.gatetheatre.co.uk/

Kids can drive you mad. But it doesn't help when generations of menfolk in your family have had a steady, never-ending job painting the Forth Railway Bridge and a penchant for inhaling the fumes of methylated spirits while they work. And you're also on prescription drugs which dull your instincts. And life feels as if you're jumping from  plot to plot taken from literature, cartoons or live-action movies.

Al Smith's loose adaptation of Gogol's classic short story sets it squarely in contemporary Scotland  where Pop Sheeran (Liam Brennan), a child of the 1960s' baby boom,  follows the family trade. Yet his fragile grip on reality, so far kept in balance by wife Marve (Deborah Arnott), is threatened by both family and outside forces.

Staged in the round at Notting Hill's Gate Theatre Christopher Haydon pacily directs the 100 minute piece. Designer Rosanna Vize has created a square dais stage surrounded by partial pipework cum scaffolding and part of the bridge's framework with paint tins and brushes suspended above. The twenty scenes are sharply delineated by Mark Howland's lighting and Alexandra Faye Braithwaite's sound design. 

Fed a strong dose of black humour, we enter the world of the Sheeran family, Pop, Marve and their daughter Sophie (Louise McMenemy). They live twenty minutes away from Edinburgh, along with Sophie's best friend Mel McCloud (Lois Chimimba), whose mother is the bridge administrator, now under Arab ownership, and whose father, with whom Pop grew up and now apparently with pretensions to Scottish nobility, sits on the Queensferry Fair committee.

Their lives are disrupted with the arrival of posh Matthew White (Guy Clark) aka Matt White, studying Chemistry at Edinburgh University, including the new long-lasting glass flake epoxy paint. Apparently the son of an engineer knighted by the Queen, Marve offers him a room, rather like the shop steward's wife and the new graduate recruit in I'm All Right Jack,  little knowing that daughter, Sophie, about to go to university herself, has already met him in the Union Bar ...

This is a  blackly humoured riff on patriarchy and a post Second World War generation ambushed by industrial and media globalization and off and online technology while still driven by the struggle for Scottish independence and competition in education and the job market.

It's a tour-de-force for Liam Brennan as the history-obsessed disorientated Pop Sheeran who loses his bearings in this brave new world where even the paint isn't what it used to be. There's a certain inpenetrability sometimes with the accents but the story remains clear. At the same time, it feels a little too long in the second half of the play and could have done with a tighter script.

Nevertheless it's a clever idea with cheeky, likeable work from McMenemy and Chimimba as the two teens aching to break out of the small town circle, as well as a strong performance from Arnott as the beleaguered but capable wife and an impressive debut from Guy Clark.  So it's an amber/green light from your Sassenach reviewers TLT and her wee automotive coracle.