Reviews West End & Central Published 1 April 2012

Vera Vera Vera

Royal Court, Jerwood Upstairs ⋄ 22nd March - 14th April 2012

Keep Calm and Carry On.

Daniel B. Yates

Keep Calm and Carry On: from Islington boutiques to the garages of eBay tat merchants, the ubiquitous meme that launched a million tea-towels has become a national symbol. It figures something called “austerity chic”, a sense of make-do-and-mend amongst Royal Weddings and the disappearing vestiges of patrician memory – and as such, it is the quintessential piece of graphic design for the big society. It is nationalism-lite, an acceptably feminised vocalisation of Little England, packaged in a sort of Swiss Style for the Suburbanite.

How very postmodern, to outsource our anxiety to a poster. As we all know postmodern wars are conducted on telly, and yet as we see, they also come home. Against the bodies of young men returning through the repatriation ceremonies which became a feature of village-life, the simple-minded slogan designed by the Ministry of Information for use in the event of a Nazi invasion began to assume some of its original function. Plump your Rockett St George cushions as the bombs fall on Baghdad, and the meme begins to look like propaganda again.

Young Hayley Squires’ tight uncomfortable play is the diametric antidote.  It comes to us not so much from the fag-end of Blitz Spirit, as from the shards of the smashed ashtray, from nicotine kisses and the cold hard lungs of  the dead.  Balancing tenderness and despair with a purgatorial oblivion of vodka and prozac, it constitutes a viciously-felt missive from the communities who have become the victims of British foreign policy on these shores.  Bobby is dead, killed on duty in Helmand province. And as his family, cut adrift from the dying embers of the church and British working class identity, try and come to terms with his death; teenage love blossoms amongst the bushes and swinging fists of the school fields.

Director Jo McInnes conjures a sustained cloud of violent energy as she did with the much underrated Red Bud here two years ago. Like a skilled weather-forecaster she marshals the cold fronts and crisp clouds of  Squires’ writing, which is itself never so perspicacious as is when deftly mapping the affective control of masculine violence.  This violence shadows days and relationships, making for a grim and unremitting hierarchy of biting alpha dogs.  And Squires renders it cooly, almost factually: the dark controlling bully is flipsided by the romance of the white knight, violence is terror and violence is loving, while the girls get their piece too, breathless with bruised knuckles.

Tommy McDonnell  grimaces as Danny; a Pinteresque poisoned well of a man; a baddun frothing with bitterness and nihilism who wants to hang a sign “No Brown People Allowed” on the church door.  Daniel Kendrick as Lee hovers vigilantly, while sly and tender Ted Riley as Sammy slurs like an embryonic Rocky as he makes his teen plays at the alert and open Abby Rakic-Platt.  As Emily, Danielle Flett is brutally frazzled on empty relationships, MDMA and sniff.  When she declares: “We aren’t good people Lee, we’re shit. I am and so are you and so is everyone we know”, the sheer bleakness of meaningless war, of funeral-as-Facebook-event-as-community, where “cuddles” are in short supply and aspiration is a lie, are bluntly revealed like a freshly-cracked pavement. From Designer Tom Piper’s stippled backdrop which suggests interminable dead-end days on the estate, this is a play utterly thrashed on empty vodka fumes and sun-bleached net curtains, the faded grandeur of white working classness, just as it encourages the tender kernels of “cuddles” and the green shoots of love. Keep calm we do and carry on we must, for all the good it’s doing us.

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Daniel B. Yates

Educated by the state, at LSE and Goldsmiths, Daniel co-founded Exeunt in late 2010. The Guardian has characterised his work as “breaking with critical tradition” while his writing on live culture &c has appeared in TimeOut London, i-D Magazine, Vice Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives and works in London E8, and is pleasant.

Vera Vera Vera Show Info


Directed by Jo McInnes

Written by Hayley Squires

Cast includes Danielle Flett, Daniel Kendrick, Tommy McDonnell, Abby Rakic-Platt, Ted Riley.

Link http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/

Running Time 1hr (no interval)

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