BWW Reviews: THE GARBAGE KING, The Unicorn Theatre, September 30 2010

Darting in and out of rubbish piled high, finding food in cafe bins and always on the lookout for the police, Million's gang of Addis Ababa street kids will remind parents in the audience of Top Cat's cartoon pals in the alleyways of 1960s New York. But where Hanna-Barbera played the cats for laughs, Rosamunde Hutt, directing Oladipo Agboluaje adaptation of Elizabeth Laird's novel The Garbage King, plays the kids for pathos.

Mamo and Dani are the newest recruits to the gang, both running away, neither knowing where they are heading, each respecting in the other what is absent in themselves. Mamo is all street-smart and loyal, but poor and illiterate; Dani, innocent and privileged, but a storyteller and a trier. They are a gang within the gang, looking out for each other, knowing that as individuals, they would be picked off. Long-standing members of the Unicorn ensemble, Ery Nzaramba and Amaka Okafor draw on lots of experience in the Theatre's "gang" to give tenderness to the boys' touching relationship - though I would have liked to see Dani played as a girl and let the actors explore the dynamic that would emerge (though such liberties must be harder to take with novels based on true stories).

With their destinies intertwined, Mamo and Dani find that they need comradeship and love even more than they need food; that wounds, physical and psychological, can heal; and that death is a part of life. They get by as they get along, but the gang is only an ersatz family and, by the end of the play, tough choices have to be made.

Kids will identify with Mamo and Dani, as their trials are universal, and they will learn also of how quickly children in the big, bad cities of Africa grow up, fending for themselves, living on their wits. As is always the case with The Unicorn's flagship productions, adults will find much to enjoy too, though some of the plotting is overly predictable and surely a slavemaster could never be as diffident as the one ambushed by the gang outside a cafe. Maybe that's harsh, because there is an edge to the play if one compares it with the wisecracks TC fires at Officer Dibble; but if one compares it with Michel de Larrabeiti's extraordinary tales of London teen-tearaways, The Borribles, this gang are rather too meek to explore fully the themes the play introduces.

The Garbage King is at The Unicorn Theatre until October 31.