According to the villain played by Jason Brownlee, his first word was an expletive. Perhaps he is using poetic licence to fit his relentless rhyming scheme, but he offers enough evidence of a damaged childhood to suggest it could be true.
Brownlee’s gangster is a child of violence, the son of an aggressive father and a kindly but drug-addicted mother. The suggestion is that he suffered levels of physical and sexual abuse that left him brutalised by the time he had reached his teens. What follows is a boozy collage of nights out; one minute, sex and cocaine; the next, a gun and a heist. The life of a gangster, it would seem, involves supplying your mother with gear in between heavy sessions in the pub.
Brownlee’s play is based on some of his own experiences, but however true this south-east London tale may be, it is also familiar dramatic fare. There is surely a fascinating play to be written about how someone with this kind of background ended up performing semi-autobiographical rhyming couplets on the fringe, but this lightly plotted collection of character sketches treads ground routinely covered in any TV cop show.
Its roots in poetry also make it stronger in spoken-word description than in dramatic drive. It is, though, given a classy production by Lee Hart for Theatre Royal Plymouth and Voodoo Monkeys. Brownlee is one of five actors sitting on one side of a long table, speaking into microphones and illuminating themselves with desk lamps. They are like figments of the gangster’s imagination, flitting in and out of sight; snapshots in the mind of a character fated to come to a sorry end.
At the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 29 August.
