How grim was my valley of the doldrums
Everything Must Go Sherman Theatre, Cardiff
THIS new play, with financial backing from pop group Manic Street Preachers, is being billed as the event of the year by the Sherman. On opening night, the foyer was seething with trendies and with fans hoping to get the autograph of, amongst others, the Preachers' Nicky Wire.
The play, portraying disaffected youths in the Welsh valleys of the Nineties, is by Wire's brother, Patrick Jones, who, one gathers, is a poet making his stage debut. His words are often spoken over music by the Preachers, Catatonia and other Welsh bands. Disappointingly the score is not original, just prerecorded snippets of old hits.
In spite of the buzz, Everything Must Go is far from being a must-see. You know everything is going rapidly downhill when you enter the auditorium and clap eyes on designer Jane Linz Roberts's supposedly grim urban wasteland. This is just a disaster area, aesthetically speaking, with two great lumps of concrete stage left and right, with one wrecked car unconvincingly distressed, and with the stage floor perversely painted a cheerful, stylishly modernist scarlet. Were this a grey world, as Jones's kids say it is, we would surely understand better why they are feeling so bleak.
To his credit Jones - though he owes a lot to the plays of Ed (House of America) Thomas - is tuned in to Welsh teenage angst and voices the feelings of a whole generation. His central character, an angry young man called A (scrawny Oliver Ryan with punkily blackened eyes), talks avidly about his pain and anger.
The problem is that he and his gang express their misery in stylised monologues that often sound embarrassingly like cliched, self-indulgent, juvenile poems. Moreover it sounds as if Jones has written numerous verses, divided them up, and put them in the mouths of undifferentiated characters.
On the positive side, Jones does ultimately produce a gripping scene with a factory manager held at gunpoint. His prose poetry can also have a mantra like power and musical rhythms that Phil Clark's actors handle with charismatic assurance.
Ryan has a fierce freneticism. Roger Evans, Maria Pride, Andrew Lennon and Rhys Miles Thomas, as A's mates, are terrifically amusing, getting off their faces and dancing with an absurd abandon. That scene then shifts disturbingly sharply into panic, grief and tragedy as one of them overdoses. It's these talented young actors whose people should be queueing for.
Until March 13. Tickets 01222 230451