BWW Reviews: BARBARIANS, Central St Martins, Charing Cross Road, October 6 2015

It is a sobering thought to consider that the lads in Barrie Keeffe's trilogy of plays performed as Barbarians (at Central St Martin's, Charing Cross Road) are about 60 years old now, perhaps solid members of their communities, perhaps not. In the mid-70s, these teenagers lived in a State more violent in word and deed (with a war of insurgency underway within its very borders), and had even fewer prospects tahn their 2015 equivalents, as employment moved inexorably away from low-skilled factory work into post-industrial jobs in the service sector. These lads railed against the growing power of women in the workplace and at an emerging confidence blossoming in ethnic minorities, as the world slid through their fingers. Maybe UKIP, the headlines in the Daily Express and the occasional old man cursing to himself in the Post Office queue is that ungolden generation's revenge - a cry from those who never had it so bad?

Paul, Jan and Louis are the three lads whom we first meet enjoying the freedom of the school leaver / trying to fill the long days with no work, no money and no direction. Personalities are soon established: Paul is the mouthy, angry leader polishing a chip on his shoulder that just grows and grows; Jan tags along, looking to fill the chasm in his life left there when his father walked out of it; Louis is the one who wants to get on, more stable at home and in his own (black) skin, he'll do okay - at least, he should do okay.

Bill Buckhurst's production is entirely carried by these three actors, who move through the bleak, derelict rooms with the audience, taking us back to a time when London was graffitied not gentrified, when it was more A Clockwork Orange than the BBC's current hit TV series, 70s nostalgia-fest Cradle to Grave. All these bleak concrete walls, encasing spaces hollowed out of the old art school, remind us of the lads' bleak lives, hollow for the want of education and life chances short in the mean streets of South London then as they are now in the old Northern cities, the environment more prison than playground.

Thomas Coombes reprises Paul from his award-winning performance in 2012, if anything scarier still, with plenty of the rage we've seen in Stephen Graham's Combo (from This Is England, which owes a huge debt to these plays) but enough twisted charisma for us to understand why his little entourage hung on to him for so long.

Jake Davies is superb as Jan, especially in the final part of the trilogy, as he tries (and fails) to deal with his fears of a posting to Belfast at the height of The Troubles. His monologue about his mother's last days is worthy of one of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads with Davies' delivery perfectly understated.

Josh Williams, looking like a teenage Muhammad Ali, rises to the challenge of keeping up with this supercharged standard of acting and does so brilliantly, his Louis carrying of the comic elements of the first play with magnificent timing and demonstrating a wonderful physical presence throughout.

After the extraordinary accolades that came the way of Tooting Arts Club's previous production, Sweeney Todd, it may seem an unusual choice to return to a 2012 production with its nihilist worldview, but then one looks at a Britain increasingly ill at ease with itself, at a public discourse that eschews the blunt swearing and racist language in these plays, but has just as much venom behind its less unrestrained vocabulary and it makes sense: a conclusion brought home by the fact that as I watched the play last night, not ten miles away in Walthamstow, a road was closed off by police as a result of a mini-riot. Paul, Jan and Louis are still with us.

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