SCUTTLERS
  Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
Opened 10 February, 2015
***

Martin Scorsese started it, with Gangs Of New York; Steven Knight brought it across the Atlantic for BBC-TV, with Peaky Blinders; now the recurrent fascination with historical street gangs has made it to the British stage. “Scuttle” was gang slang for a rumble in Victorian Manchester, and Rona Munro’s play focuses on the Bengal Tigers gang, based in Bengal Street in the city’s Ancoats district circa 1880, and their feud with the neighbouring Prussia Street mob.

Munro’s stock is high following her trilogy about the Scottish throne The James Plays for the National Theatre of Scotland, also seen at its London counterpart. Here, too, she fits in as many different vectors of relationship as a Shakespearean history play. Theresa, a maverick from Bengal Street, is the sister of Joe, who went off to join the Army and has now returned to Prussia Street; before he left, he impregnated Susan, a nurse whose attempts to keep her own brother George out of Prussian entanglements prove ill-fated. Meanwhile Sean, the “king” of Bengal Street, is facing a challenge from his resentful lieutenant Jimmy, and having trouble protecting “tiger cub” gang mascot Polly.

It is all about power: power over particular individuals as in the Sean/Jimmy/Polly triangle, the allure of power in general which draws youngsters such as new arrival Thomas into the maelstrom, even the non-violent power of intelligence which Theresa wields just as surely. Rona Morison’s Theresa is loyal to her neighbourhood but not to thuggery; her bluntness overlays an awareness that her own battle is a losing one.

Wils Wilson has considerable experience directing large-scale and site-specific work, and here she enlists a community ensemble of over 30 to flesh out the ranks of gang members and assorted other Mancunians. She also maintains a sense of mechanistic, industrial power throbbing through the city as persistently as the blood in the scuttlers’ veins: the stage is dominated by an impressionistic piece of cotton-mill plant, and Denis Jones’ almost uninterrupted score combines treated guitar with polyrhythmic heavy-industrial beats. Yet despite such assiduous attentions, we do not feel the seduction or the inevitability of the gang lifestyle, and its unavoidable heavy cost is little more than a truism.
    
Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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