Dragged Up – Review

Dragged Up by New Live Theatre @ Eagle Inn Theatre, Salford
Directed by Stevie Helps | Reviewed Wed 15th April 2015

Photograph: Darren Gates and Iain Rodrick Mundell. Photo Credit: Steven McHugh

When asked to go along to revue this play I was both thrilled and excited. Not only was it being performed in a Fringe venue new to me – The Eagle Inn, Salford – but it also promised to be something challenging and ground-breaking. Something a little more “out there” (to use modern parlance) on the Fringe Theatre scene is always welcome news! I left feeling a little deflated, but only a little. It was overall a very satisfying ( I can’t use the word ‘enjoyable’) piece of theatre and in the main well presented.

So, first to the venue. This was great. What a lovely little theatre it proved to be. After walking through a small industrial estate, into a rather bedraggled, dingy and worse-for-wear pub, I did not feel at all comfortable. But, there is a jewel in this rough and ready drinking house – a lovely little 30-seater theatre with an admittedly tiny stage, but I was rather impressed. The stage was left bare for this production, and very wisely so. We were shown the back brick wall and redundant door with cables and light switches leading nowhere. Plaster unpainted around the light fittings. It was a very beautiful in its own way. There was a metal walkway above the stage and the ceiling very high. It gave a lovely air of space and openness in such a small confined box.

Reading the programme I find that these performances were previews, and so one naturally assumes that there are plans afoot for a longer run later on. The performance I saw was certainly not without it teething problems and so one can only hope that these are ironed out before taking the play further. It was raw. It was meant to be. But it’s rawness became stymied and was its own undoing.Allow me to explain what I mean. Stevie Helps, the writer, director and co-producer of this evening’s entertainment is undoubtedly very talented. However, when one takes on so many roles at the same time it does sometimes cause problems in decision making and not being able to think too clearly. I have had the same problems myself. I have written a play and am so wrapped up in the play, that I simply cannot see it from a director’s point of view, or an audiences’. The writing is strong and powerful, but I think Mr. Helps should be writing for TV, in particular Eastenders, and not the stage. We were bombarded with cathartic ‘reveal’ after ‘reveal’ in a never ending spiral. It made Greek tragedy seem like a stroll in the park! However, in a show that lasted less than 90 minutes, it was simply too much. There was the expectation, “Oh, Ok. It’s a new scene… what are they going to say now to make the situation worse?” and therefore after the first two or three we were left wanting the horrid reveals and revelling in them, becoming spectators at the execution rather than being able to sympathise with the situation the characters found themselves in.

The plot – [if you don't want to know what happens, look away now, and cut to the next paragraph!] – We see a young couple, seemingly in love, and the girl’s father. In this never-ending spiral of things getting worse beyond hope and repair, the first thing we learn is that Rachel’s (the girl) mother is dead. Neither husband nor daughter seem to be too upset by this news, and then we learn that Rachel was into drugs and had drugged her own dad, and then they had slept together, and not just once, but had continued their incestuous affairs on and on. The dad, Stuart, then tells us that he has been thinking of suicide, and can’t live with the guilt. His wife, Jane, was a drunkard and took to drink only because she couldn’t live with knowing about her husband’s sexual nefariousness. Then comes yet another catharsis in the form of the young man who seems so in love with Rachel. He’s Elliot and now tells us that he is 27, a virgin, and also homosexual. Well, at least he WAS gay until he met Rachel, who managed to turn him. The next reveal comes when we learn that Jane had had a miscarriage, and Stuart blames his wife for the loss of his first baby. Cut to the wedding of Elliot and Rachel, and we now learn that Rachel is pregnant… but by whom? Suspicion abounds with even a very nasty joke on behalf of Stuart, however we learn that Rachel had been working as an escort during their marriage and so the baby is probably a client’s. Rachel has a miscarriage in a rather Tragic echoing of her mother’s fate. This sends Elliot into a drink and drug fuelled binge and finally decides on a course of action which sees him with a knife. He first takes the knife to Stuart’s throat, then to Rachel’s, but in fact ends up being the victim himself as both Stuart and Rachel gang up on him. Rachel throws in her final reveal, saying that whilst she was working as an escort she contracted HIV, which means that both her dad and her husband could now be HIV+ too. In a desperate bid to salvage his life back, Elliot then throws his final reveal into the mix, saying that it was not Rachel who made him straight, but her mum, Jane. He fell in love with Jane and offered her friendship. However during his relationship with Jane he found out that he was HIV+, and so, wanting revenge for Jane, preyed on Rachel, hoping to avenge her and her father’s wrongdoing. Stuart is left with the most pathetic and least believable of all reveals in that he states he thought his wife was having an affair with his brother. Now, if you have been paying attention and following all of that, then you deserve a medal. Shakespeare’s plots are convoluted but at least they run a full 2 hours. All this was done in record-breaking time; and as I mentioned earlier, the result was that we were expecting more reveals and more bad news and glorying in it. The audience left the theatre feeling indifferent to the characters they had just seen. Just as they would when switching the TV off after watching their favourite Soap Opera.

I think this was made more problematic by two things… one, the actual style of the writing, and two, the choice of direction and use of space. However I shall deal with them both together since there is a distinct overlap.The choice of space for this production is important, and their choice was wrong.. or at least the way it was staged was. It is a very intimate and claustrophobic piece in which the actors speak directly to the audience. (Greek tragedy or Shakespeare soliloquy?) It is a nice idea, but was really not developed at all. using the analogy perhaps that this is a modern interpretation of a Greek tragedy, then the audience could have been complicit in this by being made a silent Greek-style chorus. Perhaps this was the original intention. At least it seemed that way since the first two speeches were spoken directly to the audience, inviting them into their world. However, the problems with this were that we were sitting in a conventional way in rows looking up at the actors on a proscenium arch stage, and that the further into the play we went, the less and less the audience were acknowledged and we were totally forgotten about from half-way through onwards. Until the very last line of the play which brings us back into the game with a huge jolt. I would suggest two things. One, the writing needs tweaking so as to make the audience complicit and part of the development all the way through the play, and two, change the way in which you use the space. In the round would have worked better, but even better still just random chairs in a space and have the actors walk through, round and over the spectators with no real acting area distinct from the seats. This way we, the audience, are forced into becoming a part of the action, we are complicit with all three of you and are forced into making choices… which of the three of you will I support? Which of the three of you do I feel more sympathy for? And you would be left feeling very uncomfortable indeed. You may not have particularly enjoyed the play in the conventional sense, but you would have experienced something truly shocking and you would have walked out of the theatre a changed person because of it.

It was a cast of three, and all were strong actors and well chosen. Kayla Huszar plays the role of Rachel in this production. She has a tendency to speak very quickly and some of what she said was sadly lost because the speed of her delivery did not match her articulatory skills. That was a shame since she did seem the most ‘real’ of the three actors, and had a very pleasant mellifluous voice. I also have the impression that she is more at home on a film or TV set though, since a lot of her movements were very stilted and she seemed to be (rightly or wrongly) looking for her mark. Her dad, Stuart, is played by the very commanding and menacing Darren Gates. At times his voice was only just audible on the back row, but a very intense and self-obsessed performance with well measured psychotic violence. There was absolutely nothing to like about him at all. Not often a sentence such as that is praiseworthy, but in this instance it is indeed. Well done. Finally the go-between, and most difficult part of the three was played with rare aplomb by Iain Rodrick Mundell. The audience had just the right amount of empathy with Elliot at the beginning in order for us to absolutely hate him by the end. A lovely actor who was believable as a lover, a violent revengeful would-be killer, and also as a gentle homosexual.

There was also, for this production a fourth cast member. A totally unnecessary and extraneous musician, Thurston Thomson. A large part of the auditorium was used to house his keyboard, computer, guitar and microphone and for him to play his own compositions primarily at the beginning and end of the play. One was left wondering why. This is a piece of theatre, and live music was neither necessary nor warranted. Whatever music was needed in the context of the play could have been and should have been pre-recorded. The music at both the beginning and end served only to lengthen the play and added nothing to it. Thurston may well be very talented in what he does, I would not be able to comment since the style of music he composes is so far removed from my personal tastes, but both his presence and the fact that he was put on stage and took a bow with the cast at the end seemed very out of place. Use his music by all means, but not live.

And on a very final note, I found the title of the play very misleading. A more suitable title I would suggest would be either “F***ed Up’ or “Breaking Dad”.

Well done to New Live Theatre for presenting such a challenging play and I look forward to their future endeavours and continued successes.