Bottleneck

Synopsis

Am I a virgin? I think I am. I mean it went in her but it was floppy and it wasn't very nice so I think I'm a virgin. I'm going to say I am. Will look better on my uni applications. Liverpool, 1989. Greg is fourteen. He has just started secondary school. He earns pocket money sweeping up hair in a barbers. Girls are aliens. Liverpool FC is everything. Bottleneck is a vibrant coming-of-age story about becoming a man through adventures both big and small. It is about a notorious city; Liverpool. How the outside world views it, and how it views the outside world.

Our Review:

Anne Morley-Priestman - 14 March 2013

 We're in Liverpool during 1989, in the company of 14-going-on-15 year-old Greg. He lives on a sink estate (known locally as The Boot) and is in trouble at school, unhappy at home – his mum has walked out and Dad is left to brood – mad about football and ignorant about the mechanics of sex as evinced by those alien creatures – girls, gay men and paedophiles. He has one real friend, asthmatic Tom.

Luke Barnes's monologue gets inside the skin of Greg, as he rages against the world around him without the vocabulary to express all the nuances of that anger, so that expletives stand in for everything, the important and the trivial alike. James Cooney gives a very good performance, immensely physical as the narrative builds up to the Hillsborough Stadium disaster. The relentless beat of music with as small a dynamic scale as the restricted idiom in which Greg communicates underlines the action.

It's physical theatre in one sense as [S...

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