Review: Bottleneck

A boy kicks a football about a strip of impromptu set in School VI as we file in. His school tie is done up so the bit that’s supposed to be long and thin is short and fat. The boy is called Greg and is played by Frazer Hadfield. The play is Luke Barnes’ Bottleneck and is directed by Jocelyn Cox under RIOT Productions. The result is mesmerizing.

If you know anything about football, you must see this. If you know nothing about football, you must this. This is not just a play about football, nor is it exclusively about the Hillsborough disaster. Bottleneck is about the cage that extends beyond the stadium, as the simple but effective set takes careful pains to illustrate. It is about a morally and economically impoverished Liverpool, and a boy growing up in it.

Greg wants to make his dad proud, he has girls after him whom he is terrified of (and rightly so), and most importantly, Greg and his best friend Tom need to raise enough money to go to the match. Greg struggles through hoops financial, social and personal as we watch and listen. It is funny, emotionally suffocating, and there is no escape.

A one-man show is not a one-character show, an essential element Cox and Hadfield clearly understand. Yet, rather than wholly transforming into the other characters of the narrative, Hadfield portrays them faithfully through Greg’s eyes. The girls are whiny witch-like figures. Greg’s dad is a holier-than-thou, cool-as-Hell, composed-as-ever modern-day superhero. Enacting his and Tom’s misdemeanours makes Greg’s face light up.

Also stunningly presented here is the language. Some may feel praising an actor’s accent is just one step up from praising him for learning his lines, but the Liverpudlian tongue on offer here is not only solid, but thoroughly coherent. Moreover, the transitions from light to dark in Barnes’ script are handled in such a way that this adolescent’s already captivating story teems with adrenalin. The jokes shimmer through and, nearing the story’s horrific climax, there are bits Hadfield delivers like lines of poetry – and in a good way.

A one-man show requires tremendous energy, slick comic timing, and emotional conviction from its lead. Luckily just such a hat trick is scored. Hadfield’s Greg is palpably young, vulnerable, and charismatic nonetheless. He gets just that little bit too excited mid-anecdote and ends up laughing and yelling in an apparent rush of hormones that baffles even him in its aftermath. We laugh along with his potty-mouthed tales but, there’s something in the crescendos of excitement that isn’t quite right, something that goes a bit too far, and gets just that little bit too angry.  It’s unnerving. It’s still unnerving when you find out what it is and why it’s there.

Then, finally, it dies. The football, along with Greg’s youth, stops bounding about the set and is carefully put away. The child has absolved himself before us and we are confronted by a composed young man, the change aided by subtle tweaks in costume. Greg takes on his father’s tall, determined stance and asserts that, despite what has happened, he is going to ‘keep on having fun’. It’s admirable, and we hope for Greg’s sake that he’s right but at this point, we’re more lost than he is.

You don’t need millions of pounds, a cast featuring fifty dancing monkeys and a set on a patch of the moon to put on a good show. All you need is a good script, great direction, and a riveting performance. If you don’t believe me, see Bottleneck tonight. It is self-assured and commendable evidence for this view.