BWW Reviews: CANS, Theatre 503, November 7 2014

There's that moment when you see a name trending on Twitter and you just can't help yourself thinking - "Dead or Yewtree?" Cans (at Theatre503 until 29 November) takes that thought one step further - its national treasure / ageing man on trial / not guilty defendant but caked in the mud that sticks, has got through the trial but taken his own life, leaving a depressed wife, an angry daughter and a boozed-up brother to cope with the aftermath.

Stuart Slade's debut play is set in the deceased's garage, where daughter Jen (Jennifer Clement) meets her Uncle Len (Graham O'Mara) to down a few cans of Strongbow while they clear up the mess (literal and psychological) left when the man they admired so much abruptly took his leave. After a slightly unnecessarily long opening scene with mice (and an unnecessarily large volume of swear words), the play settles into a gripping two-hander, the young woman and older man pulling and pushing as they construct a world that will work for them in the future by exploring a world that neither fully knew in the past.

Both actors are excellent, giving full value to Slater's sharp script. Clement can do the sulky teen like a natural, but, as her views on life acquire the inevitable greys that flood between the comfort of a childishly simple black and white interpretation, neither her anger nor her bewilderment is overstated - this is a wholly credible young woman caught up in something awful. She's matched by O'Mara, who gets more of the laughs (and there are plenty, with one or two similies of Wodehousean invention) but still carries the play's underlying plea for pragmatism with a well-disguised, but robust, moral conviction.

At the heart of the play are the shifting moral paradigms of our post-Diana, post-Savile, Twitter-driven culture. Just as Len is amazed that Jen (just one letter, but a whole generation separated from him) knows nothing of MC Hammer's U Can't Touch This, so Jen is amazed that Len can quietly excuse a 25-year-old's pursuit of 17 year-olds (though she knows that her father was "no paedo"). What today's world would say about Elvis Presley's pursuit of Priscilla Presley (which began when he was 24 and she was 14) I don't know, but it would be different to what was said in the early 60s for sure.

At about 90 minutes all-through, this play will make its audience laugh, and also think, but never through a heavy-handed, dogmatic, thrust out point of view. This is contemporary theatre addressing contemporary issues through intelligent drama, not an op-ed in the Daily Mail. Not for the first time recently, Theatre503 has delivered a fine addition to London's fringe theatre scene, a scene that seems to thrive more with each passing year.

Photo Tani Van Amse.