Real Classy Affair ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L to R) Joseph Fiennes; Nick Moran; Liza Walker, Jason Hughes

Photography by Sheila Burnett

Director James Macdonald, Designer Rob Howell, Lighting Designer Alan Burrett

Cast : Callum Dixon, Joseph Fiennes, Jason Hughes, Nick Moran, Liza Walker, Jake Wood

‘Nick Grosso presents his credentials as a writer of full-length plays with a swaggeringly funny and slightly sinister story of power in the remote rainforests of Finsbury, north London. Much of it takes place in a pub, where four young friends with slicked-back hair and in post-grunge suits of velvety sheen talk about nothing in particular. The subject is in the subtext. Power, however petty, is about credentials – who’s in, who’s out. At the moment Tommy (Jason Hughes) is out. Stan (Nick Moran), a fifth friend, and his wife Louise (Liza Walker) are moving to Streatham, wherever that is, to open a bistro, and Tommy has not been invited to the farewell party. You sense that everybody except Tommy knows why. IN the second act the pattern is rearranged: now it is Billy (Joseph Fiennes) who is un-invited. So who knows what? Is Stan’s move a kind of escape? Has it anything to do with what may have been going on between Tommy, Billy and Louise? This is a deceptively talky way. You wonder if anything is going on, until you realise that everything is: pride, power, lust, loyalty, betrayals. The writing, and James MacDonald’s direction, ripple with tension, and the six actors, alert to every devious nuance, work with the perfection of a sinister music box.’

Sunday Times

‘Grosso’s previous plays, Peaches and Sweetheart, indicated a matchless ear for the revealing concealments of street argot, and here again he gives us the unwittingly comic posturing of council estate twenty-somethings, along with those rhythmic deflations that play a crucial role in the conversational ritual. In doing so, he uncovers the strains within a close-bonding male group, fuelled by power struggle and sexual rivalry.

‘James MacDonald’s cast is marvellously convincing in all these details of posture and gesture, and in delivering the patter so weirdly humourless to the speakers.

‘Grosso records and shapes the speech habits of this little world into an extaordinarily funny and artistic pattern which can accommodate even the playing of a complete Stewart song, with the revolve spinning round and round like the top of a kitsch musical-box.’

The Times