REVIEW: Dogs on the Metro, Live Theatre
Winning play offers a dizzying switchback ride
Emilie Robson’s winning entry to Live Theatre’s inaugural North East Playwriting Award is a breathless account of two young lives seen through the prism of journeys on the Metro – or the ‘Metty’ as they call it.
It goes like the clappers, faster than any Metro I’ve been on, its quickfire dialogue and frenetic time-travelling presenting a mighty challenge to those tasked with performing it.
In that sense, it’s audacious.
But it’s also dazzling because Dean Logan and Sarah Balfour, playing friends Dean and Jen, rise to that challenge with an acting tour de force, seemingly never dropping a word or missing a beat.
It all happens on a set mimicking a Metro carriage and with a soundtrack any passenger will recognise - the whoosh of arrival and the evenly modulated announcements, minted far from these parts, that the next stop will be Bede or Jarrow or Chichester (‘Chi’ as it’s called by these kids in a hurry to get nowhere in particular).
It’s drama on the edge of being performance poetry with its recurring motifs, shared observations about Metro-riding pooches (“cute”, “lush”) and Dean nagging Jen about whether she’d prefer death by fire or drowning.
And if that makes you think there’s an edge of darkness, too, you’d be right.
We follow, through the play’s switchback chronology, the lives of Dean and Jen from school days – “My mam knows your mam” and Dean flicking water over Jen’s classroom art – to its final estrangement.
There are sliding doors moments with various alternative scenarios rehearsed, in conversations between the characters but also via internal monologues fleetingly directed at us, the audience.
What exactly did happen in that bathroom at that party?
Whatever it was, it changed everything, ensuring that for evermore there would be ‘before’ and ‘after’. In dizzying back-and-forth fashion we witness the slow blossoming and sudden wilting of a friendship.
In Jen’s mind the memory festers while Dean seems ruefully unclear where he overstepped the mark – or what the mark was.
The notion of consent in a relationship is what’s being explored and it makes for a hugely topical play, this being a notion that wasn’t much considered in the olden days before #MeToo.
I would love to hear an audience of sixth formers debating it.
But the takeaways are not wholly sobering. I laughed quite a lot at the quickfire wit of the characters, so brilliantly brought to life, and their teenage mindsets, Dean querying the “vulnerable Bede” and Jen confessing her disappointment at finding Bede’s World was not a theme park devoted to beads (my own daughter was once similarly disappointed in real life).
This, incidentally, brought to mind an earlier brilliant but bitter-sweet Live Theatre play, Paddy Campbell’s Wet House, in which Bede’s World features prominently, getting a laugh each time.
Poor Bede. The venerable saint and scholar will be turning in his Durham Cathedral grave.
But Dogs on the Metro sits firmly in the rich tradition of Live Theatre plays, rooted in this region while highlighting issues both local and universal.
Deftly directed by Maria Crocker and with an accomplished design team headed by Amy Watts (set) and Matthew Tuckey (sound), it runs until Saturday, May 17. Tickets – selling fast – from the Live Theatre website.