Jimmy Warblegoose reviews Rex Obano's Slaves at Theatre503- We're all slaves to something.
At the interval Mental Flatmate is a bit glum. “There’s not enough grime,” he complains. “Prison’s all about knives and gangs, you know? They haven’t got enough hate.”
For anyone apart from Max Mosley, Rex Obano’s first play, Slaves – which includes full body cavity searches, onstage masturbation, semen gargling and stories of bullying in Wandsworth prison- isn’t precisely what you’d call a first date play. Hence the presence of Mental Flatmate.
MF reads The Daily Mail and is intimidated by the school kids who hang around the end of our street smoking and looking cold. I can only imagine where MF gets his knowledge of prison from.
After forty minutes of an unbalanced mixture of shock reportage, a coming of age tale and “meditation on human bondage”, Slaves really starts to motor. The characters’ story arcs begin to bind, tension increases, the audience cranes forward because they care.
A lot of this is down to a superb cast. Lead Adetomiwa Edum plays a naive young officer who learns by trial and error -by accumulating bruises- how to avoid deeper wounds. He learns he’s closer to his fellow white guards than the black prisoners he’s been sent to ‘connect with’. Edum does well to bring credibility and sympathy to a character whose actions and outlook irritatingly lack consistency.
The surest sign of his talent is evident in his ability to keep up with three actors on top of their game. Paul Bentall, playing gruff guard White, David Burt as the superbly cynical prison governor, and the terrifying Cornel S. John, as an ageing murderer Reuben, all relish a script that's filthy, funny, moving and crucially knowing.
Obano knows how drugs get into prison, understands how guards are compromised and uses prison patois with a flair and confidence few first time playwrights could match. Yet his message is bleak and arguably conservative.
Obano’s prisoners and guards, trapped in uneasy alliances and denied privacy, come to see themselves only as limited, cynical, shabby. The only difference between guards and prisoners, seems to be that the guards know these limitations and accordingly wall in their own fantasies in ways the prisoners can’t or won’t.
By contrast the prisoners’ greatest vice is a kind of vaulting ambition: prison a deserved purgatory. The anger at the system, at racial inequality, at a country which proclaims “Britons never will be slaves” is all revealed as displaced rage against themselves. Punishment matters as much, if not more than rehabilitation, and the worst punishment is knowing you deserve it, and you’re too weak to change.
This is a great début by a talented playwright.
Slaves runs at Theatre503 from 04.02.10 until 20.02.10
Photo Credit: Iona Firouzabadi
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