Charles Spencer on a Real Classy Affair, the latest 'Britpop' play at the Royal Court at the Ambassadors
23 October 1998
THE latest explosion of writing talent at the Royal Court coincided with both Britpop and the new culture of laddism. There was the same feeling of youth, sheer cheek, limitless possibility.
The best of the new Royal Court writers - Mark Ravenhill, Conor McPherson and possibly even Sarah Kane - all look as though they will outlast any brief trend of fashion. They have their own distinctive voices. I'm less certain, however, of the staying power of some of the others. Like many of the Britpop bands, they are far too deeply in debt to their olders and betters. One also begins to search in vain for evidence of real substance and development.
Nick Grosso, for instance, came across as a sparky talent with his testosterone-charged studies of teenage kicks. He's pushing 30 now, though, and his new play for the Royal Court, his third, finds him cruelly exposed. Like the writer, his characters are older now, but not much wiser. A gang of five friends, their ages ranging from 25 to 29, regularly meet on their Finsbury Park turf for pints of lager and whisky chasers. They are jack-the-laddish, wheeler-dealerish types, possibly operating on the wrong side of the law, though Grosso is irritatingly vague about what they actually do all day.
He's also not much cop when it comes to a plot. Poor Stan has decided to move south of the river to open a bistro in Streatham with his young wife Louise, who is strongly fancied by at least two of Stan's friends. One of them has already been to bed with her, another is trying hard, but it is a mark of the weakness of this aggressively masculine script that we get little inkling of what Louise herself feels about it, even though she is played by the excellent Liza Walker, who gave a performance of gut-wrenching candour in Patrick Marber's Closer.
The whole play is alarmingly derivative. The fact that Louise is always ironing looks like a knowing nod to Look Back in Anger. The really substantial debts though are to Harold Pinter and David Mamet, and Grosso's study of joshing, jockeying males, with an undertow of menace and insecurity, often seems like a parody of them both. His one strength is a real facility with the vernacular, and his dialogue - with its elaborately extended riffs of clichés and malapropisms - is often vivid and amusing. But you could cut an hour from the script without losing anything substantial and that fine director James Macdonald can do little to disguise the play's glibness despite the hippest cast of young male actors in town, all sporting nifty shot-silk suits.
Jason Hughes can make a hearty welcome sound like a threat with menaces as the leader of the gang, and Joseph Fiennes is as dark and brooding as ever, as the rival who wants to knock him off his perch. The most enjoyable performances, though, come from the losers in the pack, with lovely work from Callum Dixon, with his touching tale of lost love, Jake Wood with his outrageous accounts of improbable bar-room pick-ups, and Nick Moran as Stan, the most sublimely innocent of cuckolds.
One longs to see them in a play of real class rather than Real Classy Affair.
