Hard Fruit ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L to R) Barry Howard as Yack, Nicholas Woodeson as Choke, Richard Hope as Sump, Hilda Braid as Mrs Kooee

Production photography by Neil Liebert

Direction: James Macdonald, Design: Rob Howell, Lighting: Howard Harrison, Sound: Paul Arditti

Cast: Hilda Braid, Alan Gear, Gary Grant, Richard Hope, Barry Howard, Nicholas Woodeson

“A hard man, said Mae West, is good to find. And that is the view of the hero of Jim Cartwright’s odd, strangely beguiling new play. Called Choke, he’s a martial arts fanatic who doesn’t go much on women… Choke is what you might call a man’s man. He struts around the junk-filled backyard of his tiny terraced house like a fighting-fit bantam cock: his instinctive way of greeting his only friend, Sump, is with a head butt or a karate chop. But the diminutive Choke’s tragedy is that he cannot admit he’s gay. Almost everyone else in the play, from the burly Sump to the glass-painting Friar Jiggle and the flouncing Yack who wears a stuffed cat for a hat, is only too happy to remind us that it’s queer up north. But the repressed Choke denies his sexual nature as astrenuously as he does the cancerous pain gnawing at his innards.

“In a way the play takes us back to Road with which Cartwright made his galvanic debut at the Royal Court… Cartwright’s great gifts are for mood and language. He pins down a certain kind of tender-tough, equivocal northern maleness with deadly accuracy. He also has a talent for demotic poetry that compensates for his casual approach to narrative… Cartwright is a strange mix of Ben Jonson and streetwise soap writer. And the two elements merge harmoniously in James Macdonald’s language-loving production and in Geoff Thompson’s fight choreography in which the climactic battle is clearly a form of sublimated sex. Nicholas Woodeson’s Choke is also a powerful mix of repressed solitude and bullish posturing. But possibly the real hero of a weirdly enjoyable evening is designer Rob Howell, who is responsible for a backyard overflowing with rusty Heath Robinson contraptions.”

Michael Billington THE GUARDIAN, 7 April 2000

“James Macdonald’s production allows the characters plenty of room to breathe, and Rob Howell’s set surreally suggests that beyond the backyard there is nothing but blue sky, as if Choke’s yard had been dropped into place like the skip which is extravagantly lowered at the end. It’s a gently affectionate evening, not glamorous like ‘Queer as Folk’. Even if your imagination can stretch to the idea of a pink ‘Coronation Street’, you’ll only get half the picture.”

Jane Edwardes TIME OUT, 12 April 2000

“As his title suggests, Jim Cartwright is interested in the blend of agression and vulnerability, hardness and softness, that characterises some homosexuals; but he give the subject a different, more touching twist. For his aging protagonist, who blunty calls himself Choke, a tough, battling stance is a necessary defence against the homophobia still prevalent in his north-country enclave. It is also a defence against himself, for, though he is aware of his sexual bent, he has never acted on it and at some level despises it.

“Hard Fruit is partly a lament for “all the people who suffered for all the people who now enjoy”… Choke is an emotional as well as a literal agrophobic, whose yard is so packed with DIY punchbags and madly improvised exercise machines, it looks like a gymn from Gormenghast, and whose life is spent trying to become a “a flat-cap samurai”. This mostly means indulging in wrestling epics with his only friend, Richard Hope’s big, affable Sump, preferably to the accompaniement of military music. Imagine a gay muscle-man desperately proving to Hitler he shouldn’t be wearing a pink triangle, and you have Woodeson’s tiny, truculent Choke….

“The play neither adds nor detracts from my admiration of the author of Road and The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. As with them, the language sometimes ventures over the top. But as with them, that’s an acceptable side-effect of dialogue that’s always lively, always energetic – and often brashly inventive.”

Benedict Nightingale THE TIMES, 10 April 2000