Review: HAVE YOU TOOK THE BINS OUT?, Drayton Arms Theatre
New play addresses the issue of foster care in a culture that too often looks the other way
When I was about the same age as most of Lamp Light Theatre Company, whose debut show this is, Play For Today was a fixture on BBC Television, Wednesday night, 9.30pm. Often it examined social issues, most memorably homelessness in Cathy Come Home. It set the agenda for the nation’s conversation the way that, well, the way Loose Women does now.
But the power of drama to animate action provides reminders, albeit intermittently, for a new generation starved of that kind of unequivocal, unapologetically issues-driven stories. Mr Bates vs The Post Office and Adolescence became the nation’s conversation and the work of James Graham on stage and screen demonstrates that Alan Bleasdale has a worthy successor. It can be done - it should be done.
Tiptoeing into that space, Have You Took The Bins Out? examines the impact that growing up in care can have on a young man already charged with that most tricky of tasks - the transition from childhood to adulthood. Though foster carers do one of society’s most difficult jobs, often under the radar, unthanked and only visible when things go wrong, their charges’ outcomes are statistically poor and they are hugely underrepresented in the corridors of power.
That does not translate to each individual person becoming ‘a burden on society’ but life chances are demonstrably different for those going through the system. Why is that? What can we do to improve matters for everyone involved? Why are these stories not being told?
Theatre’s reticence to confront these questions motivated Orson Bourne to write this play, his chance not just to tell his story, but to own it. No matter how commonplace that desire may be in a young playwright, it doesn’t take long for the specificities of ‘The Man’, the protagonist also played by Bourne, to hit home. His name may be generic, but his story is bitingly grounded in lived experience.
We’re in Birmingham during the bin strike (think of the Siege of Troy, sans Matt Damon and his beard) where The Man and Zsazsa (Eloise Thody) have moved into their first home. They’re soon assailed by a busybody American woman (Grace Boag-Matthews) and a washing machine engineer (Jay-Jay Alexander), both of whom have significant presences in their past. Unlikely we think, but it soon becomes clear that characters are exaggerated for comic effect and the surreal displaces the real both as a means to provide laughs and to illustrate The Man’s tenuous grip on reality.
His fragile sense of identity is poured into a grubby binbag that he clutches like Linus clutches his blanket and, when he confronts the fear all young fathers confront with the imminent arrival of a baby, you know the centre cannot hold. Anyone who saw David Ireland’s terrifying Cyprus Avenue felt a very unpleasant shiver down the spine as that realisation dawned.
There’s such enthusiasm and belief on stage, you can’t help but wish the production well, but there are many opportunities to tighten the play for what I hope will be a rewrite and return to the stage.
We need to know more about The Man’s backstory early on, too much of it held back for a long monologue that comes very late in the 90 minutes run time and packs too much in for us to digest - on a hot night anyway. For too long, he’s merely a troubled young man, despite the flashbacks and the overly familiar portrayal of authorities as stressed, uncaring bureaucrats driven by box-ticking. It’s just too easy to place him as another eccentric for us to stare at, like Zsazsa’s father with his obsession with Puerto Rico but he's really not, as we find out.
Some of the subplots can be dropped without hurting the narrative thrust. Does Zsazsa need to be a recovering user? Does the Texan neighbour need to be a Christian Evangelist? Does the randy washing machine guy add much beyond awkward memories of dodgy 1970s movies? As is so often thew case in debut plays, secondary characters need to be developed fully or dropped.
Tighten the focus on to the central concerns of the play, feed more of The Man’s psychology into the first half hour of the show and cut the run time by 30 minutes and we’ll have a stronger drama with its punch hitting harder.
Perhaps more importantly, we’ll have a required drama too.
Have You Took The Bins Out? at Drayton Arms Theatre until 25 July
Photo images: Dexter Robinson (@photodobbie on instagram).
Eloise Thody is an occasional contributor to BroadwayWorld
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