Bruce Bane first sprang on to the Edinburgh Festival scene in 2009 and the two sequels appeared at subsequent festivals. The short run at Soho Theatre gave audiences an opportunity to see the entire trilogy in one go, spread across an evening. From an audience’s point of view, this is similar in length to a Shakespeare play but it’s an extraordinary feat from the two only performers on stage: Joe Bone, the writer-performer, and Ben Roe, who provides musical accompaniment on the guitar.
Before coming on stage for the first time at the cabaret-style Downstairs Theatre, we hear an announcement in which Bone is quoted as saying that he would never perform the entire trilogy in one go again as it’s just too much. Luckily, he’s not a man of his word.
Bane lends itself well to the box-set binge experience. It is created by a film literate performer for a film literate audience. Bone and Rowe evoke a very clear sense of Bane’s world with extraordinary economy. They do this by drawing on the audience’s familiarity with films of the genre. We’re not seeing world-building from the bottom-up here. It’s more a question of knowing exactly which buttons to press to set off a shelf-full of associations. The moody noir-ish music, the Raymond Chandler-like narration, streets populated with hawkers and hookers, etc. Once we are in this world, the tropes of the genre can be played around with. Bane is a hard-bitten gun-for-hire working for an Italian-American surrogate father-figure called Al. As he informs us from the very start, Bane doesn’t waste time and doesn’t take prisoners. When we see him in a dramatic confrontation for the first time, the joke is that he just shoots the guy three times and leaves. It’s basically the Indiana Jones joke from Raiders of the Lost Ark with the guy who does all the fancy swordplay and Indy just shoots him. We all know this, of course, and these nodding references are part of Bane‘s appeal. It’s an exercise in intertextuality in many ways but, as it’s a conversation with classic mainstream films, it manages to strike a balance between playfulness and accessibility.
As the trilogy goes on and Bane’s unquestioning stance towards the dehumanising way he earns a living starts to erode, the audience becomes sufficiently immersed in Bane’s own world that the references start to be more self-contained. Having established an irreverent Naked Gun-like tone in the first section (but with a level of heightened violence more reminiscent of Tarantino), it looked like the story would remain locked into this register, parodying a genre that doesn’t take itself particularly seriously in the first place and often sends itself up. As the narrative builds towards Bane’s realisation that he is the monster that he has been chasing all along though, the reversal manages to achieve a genuine sense of pathos. As far as tonal shifts go, this is remarkable achievement. The fact that it doesn’t feel forced and brings the audience along with it is a testament to Bone’s prowess as a storyteller and his pitch-perfect delivery.
This only goes so far though because Bane isn’t really about examining the dehumanising effects of violence. Even at his lowest point, like Bond, he has only a tangential relationship to an actual human being and the other characters are similarly cartoon-like. He will be back, of course, and what he has been through is likely to make him increasingly unknowable to others but a useful tool, not just to his mob overlords but to Bone his creator. As we approach four years since Bane’s first appearance and with Bane 4 apparently on the way, the question hangs over the franchise of where it can go from here? In Bane, Bone has created a fascinating beast and one he may, in time, find himself in thrall of.
