A powerful showdown between school pupil and three
teachers. Rating: Gotcha:
* * * *
Like the best comedy, intense, tightly
focused plays thrive in intense, tightly focused rooms. Take, for
starters, Poppy Burton-Morgan’s superb revival of Gotcha by Barrie Keeffe, which seems almost to have found its
natural home at Riverside Studio 3.
This powerful showdown
involving an alienated comprehensive school pupil and three of the teaching
staff looks, sadly, as
relevant today as it must have done when it premiered in 1976.
One of the chief
gripes of the unnamed “Kid” is that the damning school-leaver reports that will
likely consign him to joblessness are based on the most cursory knowledge of
who is he. Now at last, thanks to a hostage situation engineered by means of
chain-smoked cigarettes held above a motorbike petrol tank, he can force his
elders to face him – and face up to their failings.
Keeffe may rely on soap-ish ingredients to bring matters to a
head, but the all-or-nothing recklessness of the boy’s actions underline how,
for him, the stakes are incredibly high.
With the audience as good as locked in too, you feel his
predicament
and miss none of the
subtle, tense detail in newcomer Jake Roche’s performance. Eyes
narrowing with contempt, sly smiles twitching on his face, as he tilts between
assumed arrogance and ill-disguised vulnerability, your sympathies shift, minutely, too.
The Telegraph
Usually hostage situations involve helicopters flying
overhead, a barely controlled and heavily armed maniac and something ticking,
possibly linked to some C4 or at least a nuclear warhead. Here we have a scared
school kid holding a couple of threadbare comprehensive teachers hostage by
threatening to drop a cigarette into a motorbike's tiny petrol tank. Oh Hollywood
To an extent, it's unfair to take Gotcha to task because the hostage situation
is implausible. The practicalities of the situation (it's actually quite
difficult to set gasoline on fire with a lit cigarette and even if does burn,
it's only a surface fire) are distracting but should be put to one side.
It's fine that this is not an attempt at realism, more
about making a more symbolic point and allowing for a situation within which
certain tensions can develop.
Nor is it too much of an issue that the somewhat
ridiculous hostage situation is played straight. This is not a humourless play
but one that is not
self-aware enough to see the overarching humour in the situation. A missed
opportunity, but not grounds for failure.
What is problematic is that Gotcha is deeply indecisive,
veering between shallow
character study and underexploited socio-political theatre.
The core drama is around the 16 year-old turned
criminal but there is never enough detail or engagement - the character is
continually anonymous - for this to be successfully character driven.
The other side is the compelling issue that a 16
year-old can feel that he has no future and might be right. Yet this is skirted
around throughout the performance, with some mercilessly padded scenes. It only really comes to
a head at the end in a
brilliant moment that comes too late, where the headmaster promises the
kid that he can be both a brain surgeon and a striker if he just sets his mind
to it.
Partly because of this hesitance, there is very little real
tension. The hostage
situation is not only tired but, despite some textbook attempts to force
tension, a bit dull.
At several points the hostages' only input is to bleat "why are you doing
this?" and there is barely any sense of actual danger.
That the characters are not fully fleshed out does not help. One
small point shows this well: in the opening scene two teachers are breaking up
and the younger woman, distraught, asks if he knows what it's like "when
you love so one so badly you could tear out your innards for them." Then
towards the end of the play the schoolboy asks why she went out with the other
male teacher, since shown to be an immature bully. She replies that it gets
lonely sometimes, directly contradicting her previous emotional outburst.
It's a small slip up, irrelevant to the central
action, but it's also
sloppy and shows
that the relationship dynamics have not been properly thought out.
Despite all this there is a rugged charm through the seams. The boyish
atmosphere of a typical comprehensive is well captured, nicknames, bullying and all, giving a certain authenticity
to the night. The main character and force of the play, Jake Roche, is particularly good, humane
and warm while clearly vulnerable. There are also some good lines and jokes,
nothing too stunning, but enough to keep the ball rolling.
There's a
wasted opportunity here for looking at the contradictions underlining meritocracy. It's
not just that none of the characters are compelling, or that the performance could easily be
cut by a third, it's that Gotcha is ultimately vague while trying to be sharp
British Theatre Guide
WOS
Rating- ****
As London
Gotcha depicts a protest movement of one, of a solitary figure
exhausted by his own anonymity within a system which denies him the opportunity
of advancement or development. Though the specifics of the anonymous
protagonist’s plight may have changed, the impotent rage which Keeffe's protagonist transforms into
violent rebellion continues to smoulder.
When Jake Roche’s disenfranchised Kid
catches two of his teachers in a compromising position, he uses a combination
of cunning and cruel violence
to force them into an understanding of his plight. Poppy Burton-Morgan directs a taut production, which refuses to shirk from the multiple moral dilemmas
raised by the Kid’s actions. Already holding an established reputation for excellent work on more
impressionistic productions of Lorca, Pirandello and earlier European
drama, it is exciting
to see Burton-Morgan tackle a modern naturalistic play with such detail and skill.
Similar acclaim goes
to Olivia Altaras for her effective set design, appropriately claustrophobic
and impressively redolent
of sickly school stockrooms. Finally, and most significantly, Roche’s stage debut reveals
him as a considerable
talent. Enthralling, occasionally hilarious and always moving: his performance
alone would be reason to book enough to book a ticket.
- Stewart Pringle
Whatsontage.com Review
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