Peddling

Peddling is a marvellous thing– a production in which all the elements – text, performance, direction and design – come tightly enmeshed together to strengthen and support the whole.  It may be part of the MTC’s Education program and the protagonist may be 19, but this is not a cosy kids’ show.

The play, originally written by actor Harry Melling to perform himself, is a homeless boy’s odyssey across London, a seventy-minute monologue that brings to mind Beckett, Joyce and contemporary rap.  It is delivered – or rather thrust, hurled and fired at the audience - with amazing sustained focus and energy by Darcy Brown.  He has sharp, chiselled features that can transform from threatening to sweet, sad vulnerability in an instant.

It is directed by Susie Dee in her jagged, challenging, unrelenting visceral style.  It happens on or about Marg Howell’s set that could be and sometimes is a skateboard ramp, a culvert, a car park, a street or the edge of a lake in which Boy, protagonist and narrator of his own life, dips his toe.  Andy Turner’s lights show us all those places – and those moments where our solitary Boy is exposed and defenceless in the glare of the porch or hall lights of people who have homes.  And behind and under the tale and the odyssey is Bec Mathews’ skilled percussion, right there on stage with Mr Brown, her drums, bells and cymbals driving the action, making sound effects, simulating a heart beat and magically enhancing the tension and the tightening grip on the audience of this Boy’s journey.

The percussionist seems to be Susie Dee’s addition and it is a brilliant decision.  The original productions featured dance music.  Likewise, the set, lighting and Kelly Ryall’s subtle sound design are completely original to this production.

Boy talks to himself as much as to us.  He thinks, he ponders, he castigates himself, he buoys himself up.  He works for a scamster and exploiter, ‘Bossman’.  Bossman recruits bunches of street kids and shoves them out of his white van around London’s suburbs, equipped with an ID badge, a spiel about being in ‘Boris’s Young Offenders’ Program’ and plastic trays of ‘life’s essentials’ – loo paper, toothpaste, detergents – to peddle door to door.  It’s telling that there’s no solidarity among the boys: they’re competing enemies.  Boy himself, like the others, we guess, is a scarred survivor of institutions, violence casual and otherwise, and abandonment.

His night wanderings take him from snooty streets where the grand houses of ‘investors’ are empty, to still comfortable tree-lined middle class suburbia.  With economic clarity and mimicry, Mr Brown peoples Boy’s monologue with those Boy meets or remembers – Bossman, boys in the white van, an old woman, an Indian shopkeeper, a little girl who asks, ‘What’s the password?’  He escapes the Bossman, stakes out territory in a car park and beds down on concrete.  He blindfolds himself with toilet paper.  He is heartbreaking.

He is an isolate, about whom no one cares, muscular yet frail, sleeping rough and waking sick and hungry, carrying sadness and rage like concrete in his vitals, self-hating but defiant, coming close to suicide at moments (the audience holds its breath), but coming back from the brink, the flame of his vitality somehow still burning and a sudden faint hope impelling him on.

Okay, the text can be a little too self-consciously ‘poetic’ at times and a touch derivative at others – although Mr Brown’s concision and energy do carry him through – and the major plot twist depends on a clunky coincidence.  But we accept these things at once, such is the fluency of the words, the urgency of the tale and our investment in this Boy’s survival.  It is a play that is not easy, not relaxing, not reassuring, but riveting, implacable and finally leaving one limp but rewarded, hoping this kid will find some solace and a better place in the world.

Michael Brindley

(This excellent production has an inexplicably short run so if you are in Melbourne, get there fast.)