London
BU21t
By Stuart Slade

Theatre 503, to 9 April
Battersea Park Road,
SW11 3BW

7.45pm Tues to Sat; Suns 5pm

Runs: 1hr 40 mins without interval.

TICKETS: Box Office: 020 7978 7040
online: www.theatre503.com

Review: by Carole Woddis of performance seen Mar 18, 2016:

The good, the bad and the very ugly
It could happen to anyone. You’re walking down a street and suddenly, whoosh, the world changes. A bomb goes off – or a plane falls from the sky. And nothing is ever the same again.

How people cope under such circumstances is the subject of Stuart Slade’s second full length play, a scabrous study in Londoncentric responses under pressure.

Slade works regularly with director Dan Pick and producing company Kuleshov. Together with a group of actors, BU21 is the product of those relationships and by any standards, is a gritty, witty but disturbing portrait. Indeed, were Christopher Marlowe lurking somewhere in Deptford today, I’d wager he’d take a peek at this and like what he sees.

For as a futuristic fantasy – set in July 2016 – it shows the good, the bad and the very ugly responding to a terrorist attack – a surface to air missile has been fired at a plane over west London and fallen to earth in Fulham – with all the variety and non-pc responses you’d expect of people caught up in such an incident.

In a series of interleaving monologues, six characters describe the effect of the explosion on them and its aftermath in a support group.

Thalissa has seen her mother halved in two walking down New King’s Road in Chelsea; Ana, badly burned by aviation fuel; Clive, a Muslim whose father drops out of the sky into Florence’s garden; Graham, a lorry driver just near enough to the accident to take advantage, and Alex, a young hedge fund manager who for cynicism and amorality would fit neatly into any Jacobean drama..

Alex is the villain of the piece by virtue of his ability to say the unsayeable. Everybody’s darker, shadow side, as played by Alex Forsyth, he is the play’s comic masterpiece in dialogue which is itself a linguistic map of modern London, ripped apart by slang and expletives. And often very funny.

Theatre503 prides itself on its putting the mirror up to our society. Brilliantly, irreverently drawn by Slade and delivered by his hand picked cast, one can only hope this vivid and searingly white-knuckled London tapestry does not find itself replicated for real this summer!.

BU21
By Stuart Slade

Cast:
Alex: Alex Forsyth
Ana: Roxana Lupu
Clive: Clive Keene
Floss: Florence Roberts
Graham: Graham O’Mara
Thalissa: Thalissa Teixeira

Director: Dan Pick
Assistant Director: Kane Desborough
Design: Alex Green
Sound: Owen Crouch
Lighting: Christopher Nairne
Fight Coordinator: Lucy Slade

Voice Coaches: Elitza Goudemand, Iva Manolova, Mellie Naydenova-Slade

Producer: Holly Hooper

World premiere of BU21at Theatre 503, Mar 15, 2016.

2016-03-20 12:54:14