Pressure Drop makes a good though basic point without saying very much at all.
In polemical times, Mick Gordon's Pressure Drop is as much about what we don't say than what we do. He delves into the lives of a white working class family during a time of distress and brings to light the volatile emotions – quiet though they may be – that sustain radical thought.
Nana, played memorably by June Watson, is about to bury her World War II veteran husband (Pip Donaghy), who, though deceased, still has much to explain from his coffin. Her son Jon is returning home for the funeral, taking temporary leave from success on Wall Street to graciously slum it in his working class home-town. He returns to the home of his brother Jack, who is seriously considering turning to right-wing politics to give the white working class a voice.
Gordon's snapshot of a family in quiet crisis serves its purpose in reflecting distinctly and visually much of what is falteringly garbled in newspaper opinion polls. With each scene, the various simmering dilemmas boil increasingly violently. The impressionable children stumble, confused, among the even more confused adults; and the ones who do think clearly, think only in one dimension. Long-term friend of the family, hot-headed Tony, who can't resist labelling even his own son Gay Barney, is determined that popular Jack reverse the government stunting of the non-aspirational in his community. When faced with the return of ambitious Jon who thinks Tony could learn a thing or two from Britain's immigrants, the family are forced to confront the things they haven't said.
In this sense, Pressure Drop is both sparse and rich. The cast of only eight manage to express much of their thoughts in the unspoken – the sentences they can't complete, and their inability to explain why they can't fully support Jack running as a BNP candidate.
Bragg's music also does what it was designed to in terms of underscoring the emotion, and voicing what the characters can't with his songs 'All You Facists', 'Same Again' and 'There Will Be A Reckoning' among others.
Gordon deserves much credit for his well-sculpted characters, though there's not much to mull over after the performance. Jon is under pressure to stay connected to the roots he has chosen to dissociate from whereas his brother feels he is being ousted from the place he belongs. The story feels congested with emotional levels. The deceased Ron doesn't just love reggae because the music is good but also because a Jamaican soldier took a bullet to the leg for him during the war. And Jack's wife not only grapples with her lot in life but is still in love with her husband's brother. In setting his characters up with such strained pasts, Gordon stifles their ability to think outside their own experience. Though perhaps he's making a point.
Pressure Drop runs at Wellcome Collection until 12th May
Photo Credit: Rama Knight
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