Gong Donkeys

Synopsis

A story about storytelling

Our Review:

8 November 2004

London is another planet and Richard Cameron's Gong Donkeys comes to us from a long way off – Doncaster to be precise. It feels circa 1950, a world of dominating Dads, Dickens, the St Leger and local history societies. The only thing that really connects it to more obvious contemporary preoccupations is the telly which infiltrates itself indelibly into the fantasy games of Cameron's odd pack of adolescents.

Cameron, a former teacher, is a past-master at translating the minutiae of boring provincial – especially teenage, northern - life to the rest of the country. Gong Donkeys is no exception but unlike some of his earlier pieces (this is the sixth play of Cameron's to be premiered by Mike Bradwell at the Bush), there is something more contrived if no less telling about his observations.

Burn Gorman's bespectacled, limping Mink, for example, is both a bully, and dangerously sharp. He may seem a few vol-au-vents short of a banqu...

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Latest User Review

80.41.132.213) - 9 December 2004:

couldn't disagree more with your other and to date only reviewer. Saw 'Gong Donkeys' the other night - and loved it!Ordinary people's idyosincracies beautifully observed in the writing and the acting. I believed it; I found it funny sad scary - and such a pleasure to see a group of people really working together. Too much strutting of questionable talent on our stages (and screens)at the moment......

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