Kate Weir faces her own Sunday morning apocalypse on stage.
The Ordinary Lads is a modern tragicomedy, intriguingly written in the voice of the pub acolyte by near-forgotten Big Brother hat-enthusiast Bubble (Paul Ferguson). Three friends (Bones, Sparky and Fergie) wait for their dealer to arrive, like tramps awaiting a Reebok-clad Godot. Their lazy day quickly spirals into farcical exploits when their errant flatmate Dibs bursts in, bloodied and flustered having crashed his girlfriend's car after a wild night of fighting. The lads’ hair-brained schemes take them into increasingly shady territory as loan sharks, online gambling and irate girlfriends drift in and out of the chaos.
Pizza boxes strewn haphazardly about the floor, ashtrays smouldering acridly, a traffic cone, a couch littered with magazines: I may be at Etcetera Theatre but this could easily be my own Sunday morning apocalypse. Therein lies the appeal of The Ordinary Lads' narrative of love, loss, bromance, idiocy and weed: who hasn’t woken up to a doomed day in a messy flat with a crew of hungover, loveable rogues to misguide you.
The Ordinary Lads is also an excruciatingly realistic depiction of the dim-witted male brain fuelled by testosterone and pride. With Dibs digging himself further into a ditch, throwing away both money and dignity at his snowballing problems, there are clever touches of absurdist realism worthy of Pinter.
Simon Naylor plays wide boy Dibbs with a hapless and hopeless arrogance but the stand-out character is the loveable, optimistic weed enthusiast, Bones, played by Marc Pickering. If Twelfth Night’s clown, Feste, is described as “wise enough to play the fool”, the modern equivalent is surely the stoner, pondering ingeniously within a hazy reefer fug. Bones provides many of the plays best one liners: “can a deaf person tell the difference between screaming and yawning” and “If you have two apples do you have a pear?” Credit also goes to Nico Lennon’s tour de force turn as a middle-class competition judge, rude-boy drug dealer and a hard-ass loan shark, with a startling cache of hilarious accents to his name.
The Ordinary Lads makes for a laid-back and enjoyable night, despite its outward wide-boy braggadocio. Much like Bones’ reefer paraphernalia, the play is more complex than it first seems. There's a subtle social commentary that draws you into the fray, and gives some much needed heart to some much-maligned characters.
The Ordinary Lads runs at Etcetera Theatre until 13.02.10
Photo credit: heretakis
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