Low Down

Half-way between a stage translation of a circa-1920’s Boys’ Own magazine and  ‘Carry On Iraq’, this production takes a jolly-hockey-sticks look at the Iraq war today by looking at the original Iraq occupation by Empire forces. St Ethelred’s School is home to four boys whose fathers are all involved in the Iraqi occupation, and a fiendish plot is afoot to blow up the school. Can they stop it in time?

Review

Sam Pyke is new at St. Ethelreds, and when the play opens, he has already got himself into trouble with some of the other boys, Kamal and Ascher. Another boy, Overday, comes to his aid, and the two become firm friends (“Chums?” “Chums!”). This is not an entirely serious play. Euphemisms abound – every other sentence is one, mocking the propensity of this kind of literature to be slightly homoerotic. So far, so silly, but the actual relationship between Pyke and Overday, however, is a clever and quite emotional twist on the satire. As the story unfolds, themes emerge of the occupation of Iraq that say things about today’s conflict, but subtly; blink and you’d miss them. Chapters in the story are punctuated by ‘editorial’ interludes where the editor character speaks directly to the audience-readership.

Old-fashioned trunks are the basis for the staging, and are piled and re-piled to represent changes of scenery. A few perfunctory other items of pre-war memorabilia, a blackboard and the editor’s desk complete the setting adequately, and are used well. The funny-walk campness of the schoolboys is funny at first, but becomes wearing quite quickly, and some of the absence of political correctness seems – while no doubt grounded in historical fact and based on racial references in actual boys’ magazines of the time – somewhat unnecessarily indulgent. Other than that, the production does well to translate the atmosphere of one of these magazines to the stage; the episode structure, each one introduced by the Editor, works well, and the dialogue manages to be magazine-like while remaining engaging.

The show was really carried, however, by the cast’s outstanding audience rapport. By far the best at this was Mark Farrelly, playing variously the strict teacher Mr Pratt, the brave Croxley, and the sinister moustachioed Gamekeeper, whose evil plot the plucky boys must foil. His razor-sharp ability to ad-lib in reaction to any- and everything has the audience in paroxysms of laughter. In one scene, he entered as Mr Pratt still wearing the Gamekeeper’s bushy moustache; a mistake (if indeed it was a mistake – it was certainly a good enough comedy moment to have been a scripted faux pas) that could have spoilt a show if dealt with in a less wry – and downright funny – way than Farrelly did. Good show, that man.

Not a tremendously serious show, then; but a very enjoyable experience. Go to watch just how productive a decent audience-cast rapport can be.
 

Reviewed by N Woolf 5 August 2008

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Boys of the Empire