112) Fanny & Faggot/Stacy, Trafalgar 2

I hadn't been sure about this double bill playing at the Trafalgar which, for my hard-earned money, is the biggest ripoff among all the theatrical venues in London. I still remember paying £30 for The Dumb Waiter, which translated into roughly a pound every two minutes - absurdly expensive entertainment, no matter what the quality. Their pricing policy for the tiny Studio 2 is just as stupid - a regular show there costs a ridiculous £22.50, and this is one of the main reasons why I don't much go to the Trafalgar any more. That and the quality of their productions which is 'variable' at best - and just plain sucks a lot of the time!

Still, I remembered the posters for Stacy at the Arcola and the reviews weren't so bad, so I thought why not. The play is obviously sticking around, so it's probably halfway decent - I'll give it a whirl. I went there straight from the Finborough matinee earlier, making this a Saturday double-bill.

What's to say. I don't know who Jack Thorne is or why he's supposed to be hot, but Fanny & Faggot - or at least its first act - struck me as just plain mediocre. If there is anything more tiresome than watching two grown-ups on stage playing at being little children, I don't know what it is. (And yet it is precisely this trick which the Troubles play Mojo Mickybo pulled off so brilliantly just a couple of months ago at the same venue.) Suffice to say that the story of Mary Bell and her killer friend - as written by Thorne and played out by the two actresses – came across as hopelessly dull and cliched. The performances were irritatingly mannered and uninvolving emotionally. And judging from the faces in the audience in the barely half-filled studio (and this was only a hundred-seater venue on the final night!), judging by them, I wasn't the only one feeling that way. It was the kind of pretentious, overpriced twaddle that gives theatre a bad name.

The second act of Fanny & Faggot, set in Blackpool several years later after Mary's escape from jail with her friend, was a bit better. They pick up a couple of young soldiers on leave from Northern Ireland and proceed to booze and fornicate. The two boys playing the soldiers did okay, but overall I don’t see this cookie-cutter ‘interesting’ play having any kind of longevity at all. This kind of average stuff sinks fastest to the bottom of the pond of theatrical history, and with any luck stays there.

*

Next stop was Stacy, also by Jack Thorne, a one-man, one-hour monologue starring Ralf Little in the role of an underachieving Gen Z slacker, and I suspect it was this show that most people had really come to see. Little spills his guts about his painful sexual escapades in a peculiar monotone - he's distressingly frank, stressed out and highly strung - quite endearing really, a modern-day young white Londoner with nebbishy lashings of Woody Allen. The object of his affection is Stacy, his best friend since childhood whose unbearable hotness gives her a sort of Olympian remoteness, and to make up for a complicated encounter with this siren, Little ends up seducing (or perhaps raping) Shona, Stacy's flatmate who happens to be rather more plain and more vulnerable. It's all going horribly wrong in poor Little’s life - he also has to deal with the depredations of Debbie, his colleague at a Vodafone call-centre - and his only refuge turns out to be his taciturn elder brother. Little delivers his obsessively detailed, stream-of- consciousness spiel for over an hour with nothing but a chair on stage and projected images of various people in the wall behind him - Stacy, Shona, his brother, his mother, Debbie, etc etc - intercut with a couple of disgusting sequences showing fucking shots at close quarters and also a dead dog whose head is bashed in at one point of the story. At the end of the play, the police are waiting outside Little’s door. Overall, the story had sufficient humour and human interest to keep the audience listening to Little alone for so long - but given the average quality of the first half of the double bill, I would still class this as a rather disappointing night at the theatre.