A WIFE-BEATING car thief tries to cut his wrist with a Stanley knife. A gang leader savagely assaults a drunk train passenger. A young wife thrusts her fists into her pregnant bulge. The characters in this touring trilogy, by the Coventry-based former probation officer Chris O’Connell, may have their whole lives before them but little will to make much of them.
In Car, first seen in 1999, a gang of car thieves falls apart in a stew of guilt, drug-frazzled helplessness and suicidal depression. Repentant car-jacker Nick, with his probation officer, meets his victim, a family man who shows that pent-up frustration exists on both sides of the law.
In Raw (2001), 18-year-old Lex nearly kills a man during another graffiti and mugging spree, then turns on her idolising gang. Despite the efforts of a youth worker and her sister, Lex refuses to be controlled by society while being unable to control herself.
Both plays are driven by anger, accelerated speech, poeticised street slang and pensive moments of self-awareness while urban sounds bleed into pounding techno beats. But while this hyperactive approach conveys the restless agitation of O’Connell’s characters, suggestions of abuse and abandonment are not enough to give deeper significance to all the aggression, arrogant body language and shouting matches that rip through each play.
Rachel Blues’s metal set, evoking an urban coldness, is softened by a trellis and garden gate for Kid (2003). It’s a more reflective drama and all the more effective for it.
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Twentysomething Zoe is carrying Lee’s unborn child, conceived in anger and despair after they witnessed Lee’s best friend K kill a lad in a drunken rage. A year on, in their new home, she’s trying to disentangle Lee from his criminal past, while K comes back into their lives after a kind of redemptive exile in Central America.
A sense of struggling to grow up and take on responsibility gives the play a welcome emotional weight. There is also the pathetic figure of Zoe’s unwanted 13-year-old sister, Bradley, trying to get noticed as a would-be boy rapper.
Samantha Power, showing doglike devotion to Rachel Brogan’s troubled Lex in Raw, exudes determination and hopelessness as Zoe in Kid while Rebekah Manning, a babbling bundle of nerves as one of Lex’s crew, makes a touching Bradley trying to fit in. Peter Ash is all steely scowls as car thief Nick but a lost boy in Lex’s gang.
The performances are strong in all three of Mark Babych’s productions. They capture the thrill-seeking desperation of a young underclass even when the plays fail to examine what lies behind their unruly disaffection.