BWW Reviews: SHIVERED, Southwark Playhouse, March 12 2012

In an Essex town dependent on a car factory that now stands derelict, an ordinary family are rent asunder by war in distant lands. Shivered (at Southwark Playhouse until 14 April) explores how people cope and (brutally) how people don’t cope when caught in the backwash of geopolitical machinations.

Moving backwards and forwards in time, Philip Ridley's new play peels layer after layer off men, women and children as they swim against a tide that drags them further and further from the solid ground that underpinned their lives when the new town was booming, jobs were plentiful and statues of war heroes were decades old. 

With the factory closed and career opportunities limited, teenager Alec joins the army and is soon serving in the Middle East, leaving his ex-factory worker father Mikey and fretting mother Lyn wondering how it all went wrong so quickly. Alec's kid brother Ryan is bright, but never really knew the good times and copes with the family’s internal tensions by imagining monsters and aliens where once there machines, jobs and money.

Elsewhere in town, charlatan medium Evie is finagling money from widows looking to contact dead husbands while her bullied and slow, but enthusiastic son, Jack hooks up with Ryan to help him chase monsters while impressing him with his knowledge of more outré websites. The only outsider, unaffected by the town’s decline and consequently optimistic, is fairground barker Gordie, on the lookout for easy sex and easy money. He doesn't quite achieve his first objective with screwed up and tied up Lyn, but definitely achieves his second objective with kindred spirit Evie.

The pivotal moment in the play reminded me of a scene in Shane Meadows’ This is England, one of many parallels between this play and that brilliant film. Both focus on the white working class in decaying provincial towns, both focus on teenagers trying to cope with a family torn apart by war and both are unflinching in their presentation of violence, physical and verbal, as conflicts boil over. Like Meadows before him, director Russell Bolam pulls out tremendous performances from all the cast, with the youngest, Joseph Drake and Joshua Williams, particularly impressive as Jack and Ryan. Andrew Hawley does a fine turn as Gordie in the first half, which features plenty of laughs, before the second half’s darkness takes over and we find out just how things got so bad.

There are flaws in the piece. Though just over two hours flies by, there’s just too much stuff on show - environmental degradation, internet snuff videos and the importance of body image are all explored, in addition to the central concerns outlined above.  Quite suddenly, salt-of-the-earth Essex men and women extemporise profound speeches on a range of Important Issues, showing me a side of that county’s inhabitants previously kept well under wraps.

But those are minor quibbles. Shivered is a raw, state of the nation play passionately written, passionately acted and passionately received, with tears, deep breaths and tumultuous applause from an audience trapped in the small, often dark, theatre with men and women whom they recognise as being like themselves but lost - the often invisible victims of a distant, but no less deadly, 21^st century war.          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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