Filth
Filth at the Bush Theatre
Irvine Welsh’s Filth, the sorry tale of a bent copper’s descent into booze ‘n’ drugs hell, has arrived at the Bush after a successful premiere at Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre. Harry Gibson’s production (he adapts, directs and designs) again features the amazing Tam Dean Burn playing protagonist Det Sgt Bruce Robertson, as well as the sundry other characters of Welsh’s best-selling novel.
It’s a remarkable feat, not least because the Lothian hard man is a complex enough role to fill in itself. A seething mass of bigotry and cynicism, Robertson finds colleagues and miscreants equally contemptible, holds the sort of racist views that’d shock the Lawrence inquiry and is every inch the sexist pig. His personal hygiene is pretty dodgy too, as the bleeding sore on his bottom testifies.
The tale starts with our anti-hero apathetically looking into the murder of a young black man over the Yuletide period. He takes time out to snort coke, whack off to ‘quality’ porn, drain bottles of Dewars and blackmail a fifteen-year-old pusher into giving him a blow job.
Then, come Christmas Eve, it appears as though there’s going to be an epiphany for Robertson. He discovers a man having a heart attack in the street, attempts, unsuccessfully, to resuscitate him, and finds himself being hailed as a ‘hero cop’ by the tabloids. But it’s a sobriquet he finds impossible to live up to. The slide continues and eventually his screwed-up childhood and failed marriage conspire to push him over the edge.
Gibson’s one-man adaption means that Burn has to work hard throughout, wrestling with the voices of at least six other characters as well as Robbo’s. He uses a ventriloquist’s dummy for ‘Bladesey’, his best mate, and a pin board serves further to introduce the rest of the characters via a range of photographs.
The tiny set – a police incident room-cum-living room – is often stretched to the limits during the numerous scene changes , but the narrative is held together nicely by Burn’s energetic performance. At times the livewire Scot leaps around so frantically between scenes and characters you half expect plaster to shower onto the heads of the punters in the saloon bar downstairs.
He’s the best thing about Filth as far as I’m concerned, credibly depicting the full spectrum of emotions from druggy highs to angst-filled rants on this stomach-churning voyage of self-loathing.
Until 22 April 2000 at the Bush Theatre.
