Last autumn Southwark Playhouse staged
an adaptation of the 1980 glam-disco movie
Xanadu on rollerskates. Since
Gregory S. Moss’s
punkplay [
sic] is another skate piece set
around the same time, someone thought it appropriate to use “Xanadu”’s
title song as pre-show music. On endless loop, and I mean
endless: not just repeated, but
uninterrupted. This is how they broke Noriega.
The skates here are partly a matter of unorthodoxy for the sake of it,
partly challenge, partly satire and partly crass coming-of-age
metaphor: at the end of the play, when Mickey, the dorkier of the two
protagonists, moves on from the prescriptive, doctrinaire form of punk
espoused by his friend Duck, he removes his skates and literally finds
his feet.
This tangle is the play’s problem in miniature. Both Moss and director
Tom Hughes proclaim in programme notes their loyalty to the punk ethic
of defiant individualism and originality. However, the play is set at a
time during the Reagan era when even second-wave American punk such as
Black Flag and Minutemen – bands lauded by Mickey and Duck in a play
consisting of short scenes inspired by various punk songs, and
involving several live performances of tuneless thrash numbers – had
expired. By that stage it was always mere totem rather than rebellion.
Moss knows this, and portrays it in the central duo’s approach. This,
however, immediately strips them of any sympathy or respect; the
author’s attitude towards his characters may be intended to be punk in
the sense of nihilist identification, but what it actually shows is
sterile contempt.
With nothing to care about, the play becomes simply a matter of
entertainment and/or analysis. Yes, there are appealing moments such as
a cough-mixture-fuelled fantasy about sex with a Reagan-faced
cheerleader while Andres Serrano’s
Piss
Christ looks on; yes, Hughes makes the occasional sharp
allusion, such as to Alex Cox’s
Repo
Man by using generic blank labels on products: records come in
white sleeves with “RECORD” written on them in ballpoint. But there is
a gaping hole at the centre of things, and it is not the chasm of the
“Morning in America” era’s solipsism. The biggest issue addressed here
is how to play a bass drum pedal in a rollerskate.
Written for the Financial
Times.