Review: YOU'RE HUMAN LIKE THE REST OF THEM, Finborough Theatre

You won't read many articles in The London Review of Books before seeing a reference to BS Johnson, the writer of films, plays and novels who took his own life in 1973 aged just 40. Growing up in a working-class home in Hammersmith, he was a late starter - having only gone to university at 23 - but left a considerable legacy of experimental works that are (perhaps in the way of his main influences, Joyce and Beckett) revered more than read. So it's a delight to have the opportunity to see what all the fuss is about in the Finborough Theatre's presentation of three short plays, the show delivered all-through in just over an hour.

In Not Counting The Savages, an elderly mother is flashed in a cemetery and subsequently receives a less than sympathetic hearing from her family. Her husband is more interested in his medical work, her son in mining the details for his incipient business making soft porn movies and the daughter just uses the incident to continue her feud with her father.

There's a touch of soap opera about the narrative, but the detail keeps us off-balance. We're never quite sure about who is telling the truth and who is telling lies - everyone has a motive to react the way they do and there's a Cold War feel to the piece, with the father's tale of avoiding a Georgian honeytrap interpolated into the squabbling. Is The Family as totalitarian an institution as the Soviet state?

Down Red Lane is more obviously comic. A gluttonous man is served a succession of rich dishes by a supercilious waiter, as his belly complains bitterly at its treatment, the stomach given a working class voice and chip on its shoulder. There's more a than a touch of Monty Python's famous Mr Creosote about it, but we're spared the projectile vomiting. Again, there's an interesting subtext, this time about the dirty work done down the social class structure to support the pleasures of those idling at the top.

The third short play is the title piece in which a teacher attends a therapy session for his bad back that leads him to question God and Nature - why is the spine so badly designed for its job? He takes this existential crisis into his classroom where the kids give him short shrift, more interested in the here and now.

Carla Kingham directs the production with pace and energy and gets excellent support from her ensemble cast in which Bertie Taylor-Smith as the Waiter, Reginald Edwards as the Diner and Alex Griffin-Griffiths as the Belly deliver strong turns in the restaurant scene. A word too for Sarah Berger as the Wife, who surprises us as much as the flasher surprised her with a sudden vicious scream of revenge.

I'm glad, after all these years, to see BS Johnson's oeuvre in the flesh, and (this is praise indeed) I left the theatre wanting to explore more of his work, a reaction that shows that this intimate, brief, funny show has hit home.

You're Human Like The Rest Of Us continues at Finborough Theatre until 25 March

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