Dried & Roasted at the Glitch and Turn

The Mairie Lloyd, Hoxton

28^th May, 2008

It never ceases to surprise me how easily my prejudices take control. As this play started, with the bouncer character setting the scene, I thought idly how typecast he looked: he had clearly been a bouncer at some time, probably quite recently. But he was, in fact, no less than the playwright. And this is a very good play: boy, is this a good play. The writing is so sharp it must have been a joy for the actors to breath life into it. Every single character was spot on. And that almost impossible balance between tragedy and comedy was held all the way through. We were laughing our socks off at the saddest of people. The Not Gods Theatre Company gave us a really good play, really well done. And they were buskers: it was ‘pay what you can’ in the jug afterwards.

Of course, it may have helped that it was in a pub. It may have helped even more that it wasn’t in an upstairs room: they pushed us to one side and took the pub over to do it: ‘they’ being a bunch of saddos who were agonisingly and exquisitely funny. I know a lot of people in my local who need to see this play, just so they can see what everyone else really thinks of them.

It also helped that getting to Old Street didn’t require the truculent assistance of the TfL Journey Planner. The journey went like clockwork, so I got there 45 minutes early. Well, you have to allow a bit of time in London, don’t you? Just in case. As we passed through Bank, for example, it seemed like the Central Line wasn’t working at all. So when the play started, I had a fair amount of alcohol concealed about my person.

The Marie Lloyd wasn’t at all the sort of pub I was expecting. Again, my prejudices were cruelly exposed. Not a cockney sparra in sight. In fact, not a hand pump in sight, even as an ornament. This was city slicker country. The bar mats advertised a drink (I assumed) called ‘Pussy’! How do you order that without getting arrested? I plucked up all my courage to ask the rather dishy barmaid what it was. She said it was like ‘Red Bull’: sounds like it might be exactly the opposite, doesn’t it?

And my prejudices got another dishing on the way home. I bumped into the local maestro at London Bridge. (He had been gigging at the Mansion House) The train was so packed we were crushed right up against two young ladies. Still carrying a heavy cargo of beer, I thought I would enlighten him as to the nature of the medieval crime of ‘Frottage’. My prejudices told me that young people these days know nothing: we could talk freely in front of them. But one of them not only knew what it meant, she knew the full dictionary definition, which she recited to our reddening faces. If you’re interested, it goes like this: ‘taking pleasure in contact with the clothed body of a member of the opposite sex in a public place’. Of course, you have to be clothed as well. If you’re not, that’s a different crime altogether.