REVIEW: Graeae Theatre Company’s Bad Lads at Live Theatre
Why powerful play, produced in association with Live Theatre, is a short, sharp shock
Sometimes don’t you wish you could re-run the 1980s with the benefit of hindsight and greater scrutiny? Perhaps the same goes for the 1970s, too, or indeed any decade.
That was the notion swirling round my head, along with feelings of anger and impotence, as this powerful piece of verbatim theatre unfolded with grim but compelling urgency.
How, you’ll ask yourself, was it allowed to happen? Did the authorities not know? Was everyone complicit? Why did so many people keep schtum?
Probably things are happening now that one day will raise similar questions, and that’s a sobering thought and an argument, one would hope, for ever more vigilance and transparency.
But the ‘this’ in question in Bad Lads was a consequence of Margaret Thatcher’s election-winning manifesto pledge to tackle crime with a ‘short, sharp shock’ policy aimed at jolting young offenders onto the straight and narrow.
What happened at Medomsley Youth Detention Centre in County Durham may have been an unintended consequence but that’s hardly a mitigating factor when so many blind eyes were turned.
The place seems to have been a playground for vicious bullies and perverts, given free rein by a management that was at best ineffectual and at worst complicit.
From the accounts of some of their traumatised victims, persuaded years later to speak out and strengthen a belated police investigation, we get a sense of the pervasive fear and horror.
Playwright Mike Kenny has distilled the experiences of Jimmy Coffey and others into the testimony of one man played by two actors, Robin Paley Yorke as young Jackie and Danny Raynor as his troubled older self, 32 years on - with the latter also morphing deftly on occasion into one of the chilling ‘screws’.
In the former we have the chirpy 17-year-old who, in 1981, arrives at Medomsley for the heinous crime of commandeering a milk float in a moment of late night daftness.
It’s only a three month sentence, he reasons. He can get through it.
But when the police officers leave and men with nicknames such as Puppet and Broken Nose - the ‘screws’ - take over, the routine of beatings and humiliation begins immediately.
When Jackie innocently volunteers for a kitchen job, he enters the realm of Neville Husband, a sexual predator who preys on his young charges with seeming impunity.
“This play is short, sharp and shocking,” it says on the screen above the stage before the story unfolds. And that’s no exaggeration.
What follows is compelling but gut wrenching – and we live it as in the moment through the eyes of young Jackie and from the perspective of his older self, a man for whom three months became a life sentence and who is now struggling to share what he has long bottled up.
Also on stage is versatile Craig Painting who functions as performer and BSL interpreter.
The interaction between the three men is cleverly choreographed and executed, the powerful narrative thread taut throughout. Credit to them and to director Jenny Sealy, artistic director of the excellent Graeae Theatre Company whose production this is in association with Live Theatre.
It’s 70 minutes with no interval. Throughout Friday night’s performance there was silence, as of an audience holding its breath. It’s shocking, riveting, brilliantly done.
Afterwards, of course, I went Googling. There’s a lot online about Medomsley, noxious Neville Husband and the only other ‘screw’ mentioned by name, the thoroughly unpleasant Christopher Onslow.
Both were jailed eventually, although that’s beyond the scope of the play.
You will likely conclude, though, and it’s clearly the sentiment of those involved in the production, that questions remain to be answered.
For instance, who was the man Jackie recognised off the telly at the perverts’ Christmas party where he’d been the blindfolded ‘parcel’ to be passed around? Someone must know.
Bad Lads can be seen at Live Theatre until Saturday, October 11, before it embarks on a national tour. Tickets from the box office. After the October 9 performance there’s to be a post-show discussion which should be fascinating.
I doubt Jackie was in the kitchens in 1981”..!
Had he been they're” he’d have been taken out to a similar dramatics society and Raped.