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I Licked a Slag's Deodorant
by Jim Cartwright.
REVIEWS: City Life, North West Arts, The Stage, Alan Hulme REVIEW - CITY LIFE.
03 - 18 March 1999
A RIGHT GOOD SLAGGING Daniel Brocklehurst talks to Rocket Theatre director Martin Harris about slags and cults. After winning the Manchester Evening News award for best fringe last year, Rocket Theatre make a welcome return with their confident staging of Jim Cartwright's seedy one act play. I Licked A Slag's Deodorant. Set in an unspecified Northern town, the play is a series of monologues segued together to create a picture of life at its most ugly. Man is a loner; he lives in a crummy bedsit with only the TV and a wank mag for company. Occasionally, he'll venture out to the pub or the disco, but he doesn't interact, he merely observes. Slag is a hyperactive drug-head; she walks the streets chanting her mantra to the punters -'twenty for sex, fifteen for a blow job, ten for hand relief.' Despite the huge gulf between them, Slag and Man meet and forge a bizarre Intimacy between the blood and the cum. As you may have guessed, Slag's Deodorant is a little darker than previous Cartwright outings Road, Two and The Rise and Fall of Little voice. However, it does have the same ingenious mixture of comedy and despair. Director Martin Harris explains. "Some people find the play very funny. But it's not a straight forward comedy; you sort of laugh and then feel guilty. I like that aspect of the play. I want to put the audience through a roller coaster of emotions." Rocket was set up in 1995 with a commitment to bringing the best plays from London's 'new writing' theatres to the North West. Previous productions include Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills, Joe Orton's The Ruffian on The Stair and Tom Stoppard's After Magritte, so what was it that drew the company to the Cartwright play? "I've always shied away from the wanky aspect of theatre," says Harris, "And I've always been a big fan of Jim Cartwright. I'm very passionate about his writing, he manages to say an awful lot with so very little." It's a wonderful irony that the previous City Life theatre editor, Jim Burke, initially suggested that Rocket Theatre Company wouldn't last more than a couple of months and now, four years later, they're presenting the world premiere of Burke's new play, Arise. Working as a companion piece to Slag's Deodorant, Arise is a very dark comedy exploring the pertinent late 2Oth century issue of cults. Behind the quasi-Armageddonist mumbo-jumbo of the prophet Bellow's philosophising, lies a shrewd businessman with the power to exploit his believers. Utilising monologue, voice-over and a visual projection, Burke challenges audience expectations to mixed effect. For Harris, the play is being performed at the optimum moment: "Because of the issues the play deals with I knew that I had to do it before the Millennium. It was a case of now or never." With the MEN award proudly on Harris' mantelpiece and a sponsor on board for their coming season, Rocket have most definitely left the launchpad.
'I Licked A Slag's Deodorant' was excellent - from the first scene the quality of the writing was apparent and the company has obviously revelled in the opportunity. A terrific script, two fine performances and deft direction combined to make this a really outstanding production. - Ian Tabbron, Drama Officer.
REVIEW - THE STAGE AND TELEVISION TODAY
March 4th 1999.
THEATRE REVIEW Manchester Arise/I Licked a Slag's Deodorant Rocket Theatre Company began an all-too-brief northern tour with an interesting double bill containing a new work, Arise, by promising playwright Jim Burke, and Jim Cartwright's intriguingly titled I Licked a Slag's Deodorant which were performed at the Didsbury Studio Theatre. This space, as its title implies, is a basic college studio with little in the way of lighting and less in the way of scenery, and it is to the credit of quality performances, as well as director Martin Harris, that the material was so well served. Arise is a clever and cynically witty comment on the new religions - and particularly cult leaders - with little to say and their blindly faithful followers. Although director Harris provides the voice of the prophet Bellow, this is virtually a one-man show with a first- rate performance from Simeon Truby, playing the marathon role of Morty, the follower, whose fanaticism is tried and tested with interesting consequences. There is also an imaginative use of audio-visual material and references to the millennium, which make this work very much of our time. I Licked a Slag's Deodorant is a powerful piece of uncompromising theatre about the meeting of two lost souls who find a kind of comfort in one another. Anthony Bessick gives an excellent performance as the pathetic loner who has to buy love, while Emma Sheldon is superb as the crack-addicted prostitute. Their battle for survival is harrowing but makes first-rate theatre, as do both these one-act plays. - Natalie Anglesey.
NO wonder Jim Cartwright isn't the most prolific of playwrights or that his scripts often tend to be short as well as snappy, because he is a master of saying so very much so succinctly. Take, for example. the opening few, very brief scenes of this, his newest play, here getting its much overdue north west premiere. The Man, a middle aged, sad loner, gets beaten up on his way home, sees another sad loner being carried out of the flats, dead, licks the Slag's deodorant and tells of his deprived upbringing and of finding his mother dead in bed, all that in about five minutes in a burst of quick-fire energies and richly descriptive language that etch the detail into your mind. It's a very funny, quite dirty and achingly sad play, that pitches this poor misfit in with a crack-addicted Slag who pauses in her street walking just long enough to go home with him. Once there, they strike up an oddball relationship that finally sees him beginning to get a life, even if it is on the floor under the bed where Slag entertains her clients. It is well up to Cartwright's usual standards, which is to say it's pretty brilliant, so thanks to Manchester-based Rocket Theatre Company for bringing it North, as part of their policy of staging work from London's new writing theatres. Rocket founder Martin Harris directs two cracking performances by Antony Bessick and Emma Sheldon and welds the whole thing together with great skill. Fans of new wave theatre shouldn't miss it. - Alan Hulme.
   © Rocket Theatre 2003 |
