The Beast's Pen

Photo: Mark Douet

Writer: Rajiv Joseph

Director: Alice Hamilton

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Supporting a sports team can be a precarious business, made up of soaring highs and dismal lows. Very much like most of our lives in and relationships perhaps. American writer Rajiv Joseph’s short four-scene play matches up the fluctuations in the fortunes of an American professional Basketball team with the ups and downs in a friendship between two young men, both supporters, over a period of several years.

In his earlier play, Guards at the Taj, Joseph explored the intricacies of male bonding. Here the time and the setting are very different, but the essential themes remain the same. In Cleveland, Ohio, Matt (Sam Mitchell) and Shawn (Enyi Okoronkwo) are brought together by their shared love for the Cavaliers (“Cavs”). Matt is raising quick cash by selling his ailing father’s pair of season tickets, Shawn has a windfall from selling a short story and is the potential buyer. But who will he take with him to the matches?

The lads’ “King” is star player LeBron James. They feel the pain of his treachery when he leaves the Cavs for Miami and they embrace the ecstasy of his triumphant return. His success becomes a symbol of how great things can emerge from humble beginnings and he inspires them as they strive to win through in their own lives. Shawn moves to New York and them Los Angeles, while Matt remains rooted in Cleveland, the pair fall out and make up, but, for both, the draw of friendship and the Cavs remains constant.

The quick fire exchanges give director Alice Hamilton’s perfectly pitched production the feel of a David Mamet piece. It seems remarkable that these young British actors are able to master the pace and rhythm of Joseph’s dialogue with such consummate skill, but their sensitive performances also delve deep into the hearts of their characters. A minor gripe – a play that runs briskly for around 80 minutes is extended to 100 minutes by the intrusion of an interval; a set change explains this, but it does not justify the disruption to the play’s flow.

The finer points of American Basketball may fox many in audiences at Hampstead, bu what should be crystal clear to all are the razor-sharp quality of Joseph’s writing and the absolute precision of the two performances

Performance date: 21 November 2024

Photo: Rio Redwood-Sawyer

Writer and director: Ché Walker

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Be warned! Ché Walker’s new 70-minute play, Burnt-Up Love, receiving its world premiere here, takes us to very dark places. It explores how love and violence can co-exist side-by-side and feed off each other. It is a harrowing, yet strangely rewarding experience.

As writer, director and leading actor, Walker spreads darkness all around the Finborough Theatre. Five candelabras and, occasionally, a torch are the only sources of light. Seen through the gloom, the three characters vaguely resemble Dickensian villains. Sharing a room with them feels dangerous.

Mac (Walker) is serving a 20-year prison sentence for murder. He combats the harsh realities of prison life with only a small photograph of his smiling, then three-year-old daughter keeping him going. He imagines that she is on her way to achieving one of the lofty goals which he has set for her and, on his release, his sole ambition is to find her.

Joanne Marie Mason is superb as Scratch, the daughter. She is a wild spirit, bright and street-wise, dragged to the fringes of the criminal underworld as if it is her birthright. She forms an edgy romantic relationship with another petty criminal, JayJayJay (Alice Walker), but, as if it his in her genes, gruesome deeds from her past return to haunt  her and the chain of violence in her family remains unbroken.

Stark and often shocking, Burnt-Up Love hits with the force of a short, sharp shock. Written in the style of an epic love poem, it takes us into an underworld in which normal civilised behaviour is readily set aside, but one in which deep human emotions still thrive.

Performance date: 31 October 2024