ORPHANS

15/10/09, Soho Theatre

1 hr 40 mins. Transfer from Edinburgh of a three-hander about a married couple on a sink estate and her brother, who bursts in on their diner a deux with blood on his hands (and on his T-shirt -- loads of it).

He turns out to be a psychopath who has seized some hapless Asian man, attacked him with a knife, dragged him to a friend's shed and tied him up there and tortured him. This emerges by degrees, in a succession of revelations. The sister (they are orphans) defends him right up until the very last revelation, at which point it becomes clear, even to her, that his actions are indefensible.

But by then the husband (until then an upright character who is however putty in his wife's hands) has been persuaded to join in by terrifying the man, in the hopes that he won't go to the police. So the well has been well and truly poisoned.

A fable about blood being thicker than water, perhaps. Brother and sister are orphans, brought up by foster parents, and she has always looked out for her damaged sibling (who may have been the cause of the fire that killed their parents, and who ensured the couple wouldn't be parted by beating up a small boy at school when it looked like his sister might get a place with a nice middle-class family). She is in denial about his character, constantly making allowances for him, painting his unspeakable actions in the best possible light (as S said, constantly fending off reality), until reality intrudes too horribly).

The dialogue a highly stylised version of prole-speak: lots of "know what I means?", repetitions, uncompleted sentences, a veritable blizzard of F-words and C-words and P-words, all delivered with a reverence and deliberation worthy of Beckett. Happily the stylisation wore off a little as the evening wore on (or perhaps we just got used to it).

A convincing enough portrait of the compromises those at the bottom of the heap often have to make. We differed as to the significance of some of it, though, notably the question of abortion. At the start our heroine is carrying the couple's second child. Then she tells her husband she's thinking of aborting it. I couldn't see a reason for this, unless it was to find some emotional leverage over him; S and A thought it was because she feared the child might turn out like her brother, even though the couple's existing six-year old seemed perfectly OK. At the end she has decided she might keep the child, only to be told by her compromised husband at the very end that he wants her to get rid of it. Is he worried about its inheritance? Or is this revenge for having been dragged down by her?

All done on a single set, with a table and three chairs and exits stage left (to the kitchen) and stage right (to the hallway)... plus glimpses of high railings outside the house, and the lights of passing cars.

Interesting to see if it would have been as gripping without the spooky music, which I found intrusive (which is to say, I noticed it...).

Good performances by Joe Armstrong as the psycho brother, Jonathan McGuinness as the husband and Claire-Louise Cordwell (last seen as Desdemona in the Frantic Assembly Othello at the Lyric Hammersmith last November). Written by Dennis Kelly, directed by Roxana Silbert, a Paines Plough/Traverse/Birmingham Rep co-production.

ROARING TRADE

17/1/09, Soho Theatre.

1hr 45mins approx, no interval. A sell-out.

What sounded like a very timely play by Steve Thompson about City traders and City greed: would it give us an insight into how we got into the present mess? In fact it was written too soon. It certainly skewers the questionable ethics and playground behaviour of many traders -- but beyond that there were no revelations. We went to see it mainly because S had met the very dishy real-life city type whose expert advice helped make characters and situation convincing.

Four desks (which double as restaurant tables, even a bed at one point), four sets of screens, four speaker phones, four traders. PJ is middle aged and losing it; he keeps going with copious liquid lunches and bluster, only in order to satisfy his expensive wife who is obsessed with exotic holidays and her new kitchen. His colleagues mock him for his eagerness to engage them in conversation about all manner of subjects, but it least he has some kind of hinterland when he tells the boss to shove his derisory bonus and walks out on the job.

Donny is an East End street trader with post-divorce visiting rights. In the best scene by far he teaches his young son (brilliant comic performance by Jack O'Connor, a lad who looks as if he can't be more than 12) about short selling, using a sachet of tomato ketchup in Macdonalds, and about the gamesmanship traders use. He pretends to get angry when he realises his son has put one over on him; when the boy hands the ketchup back in alarm Donny upbraids him -- if he's angry it means his judgement is impaired; the boy can take advantage of that. At their next meeting the lad produces a bag of pound coins, acquired by exploiting his nan's soft heart.

Spoon is a posh graduate (a First from Jesus, rowing blue), bullied and then humiliated in a trade by Donny, who learns fast, gets his own back and turns out to be a straightforward liar and a cheat.

And then there's the woman, Jess, who flirts shamelessly, sees through all the boys' posturing and delivers the plot punchline at the end. As so often, it's the women who have a sense of proportion the men sadly lack.

(The first scene, in which Jess and Donny role-play a job interview which ends up with the pair of them having a quicky, is an arresting beginning but seems to belong to a different play altogether.)

The milieu and motivations (greed, mainly) are convincingly established, as in Thompson's play Damages, about tabloid invasions of privacy (seen at the Bush c 2005). And there are some good gags, but not as many as in Whipping It Up (seen at the Bush c 2007), about Parliamentary whips. But the plot of this one came off the shelf rather than off today's front pages or Peston's blog, and that seems a shame.

Later: I went for work to a real-life City trading floor for the first time in years a few weeks after seeing this. And it truly is a bizarre world which this play does a good job in capturing. They'd all sit around doing very little but staring at screens until someone (the lead trader, presumably) made a shouted announcement, incomprehensible to outsiders. There then followed a great deal of shouting, phone calls, further incomprehensible exchanges; and then the excitement would subside after a minute or so and the prevailing lull would return... until another bunch started up in another corner of the floor.