Ben Woolf’s young company MahWaff have
been forced by illness to cancel The
Explorer, the other half of a planned double bill. This may be a
mixed blessing. Angry Young Man
demonstrates a great facility on Woolf’s part both as writer and
director, but also a tendency to use this gift to let himself off the
hook with a wry turn of phrase or a bit of comic business.
Yuri is a (to judge by his name and the opening burst of speech,
Russian or Ukrainian) surgeon come to Britain after losing his job in
dubious circumstances. He is befriended and exploited by a
self-lionising soi-disant
liberal and his patrician airhead girlfriend, and encounters various
skinheads and sharp dealers – pretty much 31 flavours of racism –
before eventually setting out for revenge. The company of four men, all
onstage throughout the hour-long piece, alternate the role of Yuri as
well as playing everyone else; there is a nice running gag whereby Hugh
Skinner gets all the thankless parts, such as a dog, a door and an
antlered head on the wall.
The major device is the radical inconsistency between Yuri’s eloquent,
ennobling narrative of the events he experienced and our view of them
acted out in altogether meaner, more linguistically halting fashion. It
is amusing (Hywel John in particular gets mileage out of the dichotomy
between his resonant voice and gangling physicality), but Woolf the
director is too free with the physical side of things; Alex Waldmann
virtually clowns his way through the show. On first seeing the play in
Edinburgh in 2005, I remember assuming that the company must have been
cutting loose on their final performance; this revival shows that I was
mistaken.
Moreover, in less than three years, the play itself has become
outdated. Yuri is portrayed as prey to all these folk due to his
solitude; however, following EU expansion, even conservative official
figures a year ago found as many eastern Europeans living in Britain as
people of either black African or black Caribbean origin, and twice as
many as those of Chinese heritage. It’s a different place now, and
again there seems to be something a little too easy about the play’s
assumptions; reviving it without significant rewrites feels not just
quaint but careless.