BWW Reviews: BLUEBIRD, The Courtyard Theatre, July 23 2011

Do people still talk to taxi drivers? Though written just 13 years ago, Simon Stephens' Bluebird (at the Courtyard Theatre until Saturday July 23 and at the Bedlam Theatre, Edinburgh from August 22 - 27), pre-dates smartphones and so, as every generation says to the one coming up behind it, people had to make their own fun travelling through London. Well, not quite fun exactly, more confessional, with the taxi driver as priest and the car as box.

In the hurly-burly of metropolis, cabbie Jimmy drives through a steamy evening and into the night, picking up fares and hearing their stories. There's the teenage hooker dreaming of a better life in Santa Barbara ("that's my favourite television programme"); the raging skinhead slowly, very slowly, growing out of the seductive simplicities of racist ideology; the bouncer with a sensitive side; the ex-teacher desperate for a baby; the mother seeking revenge on her teenage daughter's killer; and many more. These characters swirl around Jimmy, who gives them all a sympathetic ear, while he slowly reveals a past with a terrible secret.

In the second half of the play - a two-hander between Jimmy and his estranged wife Clare - the secret is revealed and we understand the enmity that lies between them and the cause of Jimmy's retreat to the tiny world of his cab. Though it's hardly an unexpected twist in the tale, there's a certain satisfaction in mentally going back through the fares' stories and replaying them in the light of the knowledge we now possess. As Jimmy and Clare reach a kind of ceasefire, the play's central themes of regret and redemption are shown to be more nuanced, more complex but just as cathartic as one finds in the stock sentimentality of daytime television.

Director Andrew Whyment draws excellent performances from the mainly young ensemble cast, fulfilling Squint Company's aim to produce bold, contemporaneous theatre. Holding it all together, Garry Jenkins convincingly plots Jimmy's journey from living in the past to dealing with the present receiving particularly fine support from Juliet Turner as Clare, initially all anger, reaching, if not quite reconciliation, at least a mutually acceptable place to restart her, and Jimmy's, lives. The audience leaves having learned much about the lives of many, and a fair bit about their own.