[written for The Public Reviews]
This bold and brash play is not The Globe’s usual fare but Dominic Dromgoole, the artistic director, should be commended for taking a risk even if it the result doesn’t quite hit the mark. Chris Hannan’s play has been written specifically for this theatre and he makes a valiant attempt at bringing his original play to life in a very demanding space. Ostensibly about voyeurism and our addiction to celebrity, self-promotion and self-obsession, the performance benefits from the inclusion of the audience – a large number of whom stand fully lit in the pit laughing along and becoming immersed in the action on stage.
We are in a gaudily lit heaven and a panoply of loud-mouthed Gods, decked out in white and gold with biker flourishes, watch as Big God’s daughter, Clem, is cast to earth to learn to love the man who has damaged her pride. Clem ends up dossing with a tramp on the streets of Soho and finds that, while she was sleeping, a pink handbag stuffed with sex toys has been planted on her. This provides the link to the other strand of the play; the violent relationship between self-deprecating reality star Natty and her sex obsessed boyfriend Baz, who has snatched her pink bag away in a threat to expose her to the press. The quest to restore the missing bag brings the two strands together but there is definitely no Shakespearean master-plotting here as the two story arcs collide to very little purpose.
Hannan’s use of language is to be savoured, though. Natty rather heavy-handedly draws attention to the burden of this play having to live up to what has very recently passed on the very same stage – a Shakespeare play. The language must be bold but also poetic – it must work hard to weave its magic in such an unforgiving space. Luckily Hannan’s larger-than-life characters are more than up to it. Phil Daniels’ Big God is a great pronouncer of truths. One of his best lines, ‘she’s the Afghanistan of love – best left in peace’, is paradigmatic of Hannan’s genius of translating big observations into even bigger jokes, thus avoiding any deflating earnestness.
And there are some excellently acerbic observations in this play which, with Hannan’s lightness of touch, avoid leaving a judgemental aftertaste. There is no judgement here as everyone is exposed as equally troubled and cast adrift in a world of which they fail to make any sense. But this doesn’t mean that everyone’s amoral behaviour isn’t riotously funny. Baz says the morning birds, singing away energetically, sound like they have been ‘on the Charlie’ all night long and Natty is pursued by a publicist who would rather see her client go to prison than being reconciled with her boyfriend because it would attract more column inches.
There is some very astute staging here which is as impressive as an optical illusion; look again at the classical columns of the Elizabethan stage and they are the garish marble pillars of a celeb’s Essex mansion. This fakery is cleverly echoed by Natty’s sister Teresa deriding her taste in her ‘mock Tudor’ décor which ‘looks like a copy of something’ – the air-headed Natty counters that every column is a ‘genuine replica’. Despite the sometimes excellent writing and the brilliant performances, especially from Iris Roberts as Clem, for all its self-conscious comparison to Shakespeare, The God of Soho fails to deliver on plot. Both a fabulous spectacle and a treat for any connoisseur of the English language, this play has many highlights but the story fails to cohere into either a meaningful satire on modern day celebrity or a deeper exploration of the human condition.
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