Low Down

Some stunning performances hold up this tentative but ably scripted snapshot into cocaine-dealing in Edinburgh. Strait-laced medical student Edin is talked into dealing coke to support the habit of his boyfriend Tennyson by small-time dealer Knowles. Culum Simpson as the charming London-boy addict Tennyson and Chris Starkie as the aggressive but deeply human drug dealer Knowles completely steal the show, but unfortunately receive little reaction from a somewhat wooden Lucas Motion as Edin.
 

Review

The production opens with some low-level generically urban music. Two people are on stage, one has a gun. They are frozen in tableau under blue-green lights. A third man walks between them dreamily, reciting a Shakespeare quote. When he is finished, the lights change to a more normal setting and we see the first scene, Edin’s flat. Tennyson is admiring it; there is awkwardness in the dialogue, and we find out that we are witnessing the final stages of a seduction.

As Edin and Tennyson’s relationship advances, so does Tennyson’s cocaine habit, and Edin starts dealing as an agent of a bigger dealer, Knowles. But Edin keeps coming back short – he is giving drugs away to Tennyson, unable to say no to him. After Knowles becomes threatening, Tennyson convinces Edin to cut the cocaine with other substances to keep the weight up, allowing Tennyson to skip some for his personal use off the top. However, Tennyson cuts the cocaine with rat-poison, and causes the death of a young user, whose brother tracks Edin and Knowles down.

The staging of this production was well put-together, and the dialogue outstandingly written, managing to say some very interesting things about addiction, and class, while remaining accessible and entertaining as well. The character of Knowles, the hard-bitten drug dealer, is especially well conceived, managing to betray hints of humanity and decency without falling into the trap of being a kitsch hard-man-who-goes-‘ahh’-at-the-slightest-hint-of-kittens cliché.

Tennyson’s addiction, too, is beautifully portrayed, and his monologues are both convincingly drug-addled and intricately insightful. These scenes of direct action, though, are bridged by some bizarre flash-forwards to the end, in which a small part of the dramatic final confrontation is revealed to us under a blanket of green light, and then punctuated by vaguely relevant Shakespeare quotes, which are only tentatively grounded in the plot.

While these flash-forwards sort-of worked to build tension, even if the slow-motion effected occasionally made me want to giggle, I felt that it was a shame that the production felt the need to throw some Shakespeare in, as if to borrow some credibility, especially as the writing was easily good enough to stand up on its own.

Chris Starkie really is stunning as Knowles and Culum Simpson is equally good as Tennyson, both of them adding vast acres of nuance to already brilliantly-written characters; it is their performances that really make the show come alive. I was confused by Lucas Motion’s Edin, who seems much blanker by comparison, though in a way this made the character less of an actual component of the plot and more an extension of the audience, an implicit “what would you do?” question. In a way, this worked, but I would much prefer the part to be played a bit more confidently, a bit more extrovertly.

Though this production might be flawed, it is by no means fatally so, and Starkie and Simpson’s performances, twinned with Luke Norris’ writing, are well worth coming to witness. They really are a joy to watch, taking well-written characters and entirely becoming them from the ground up.

Reviewed by N Woolf 4 August 2008

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