Bane (Harrogate Theatre)

Bruce Bane is a gun for hire, with few apparent scruples and a desire for the quiet small town life that arises only when he needs to escape dangerous enemies in the city – and, as his gang boss employer Vicenzo says, "once a killer, always a killer." Bane inhabits the world of pulp fiction and the B movie end of film noir, with an added lurid element of sci-fi fantasy, as in the small time crook/victim transformed into a monster by toxic waste!

Bane, the creation of Joe Bone for Whitebone Productions, is a series of three short plays (a fourth is rumoured) about the misadventures of Bruce Bane. Though they are free-standing and can be seen out of order (as I did) one play’s narrative follows another and, if possible, sequential viewing is recommended. Bane’s relationships are generally short-lived, but his meetings with his devoted neighbour Neil continue across plays and the final twist of Bane Three has history in an earlier play. The style of Bane, with its dramatic pre-credits sequences, derives from cinema serials – except that it is totally unique!

Over the last five or so years Bane has garnered awards at festivals and on the fringe internationally – and it is easy to see why. Joe Bone’s script crackles with (largely comic) invention and his performance re-defines the term tour de force.

Shifts of tone take us into sometimes wildly funny parody of the genre, flights of fantasy and, surprisingly, genuinely dark dramatic moments, but through it all Bone astonishes and amazes: delivering hard-boiled narrative, switching accents, defining a character by the twist of his mouth, changing sex mid-sentence, creating his own sound effects, forcing us to imagine bloody fist fights and falls from high buildings. Best of all are his walks/runs along sidewalks, with the traders, sharpers and passers-by each captured in a sentence and a gesture.

Joe Bone has no set, no props, but he does have Ben Roe whose guitar creates atmosphere or provides hurry-hurry music or offers an oblique commentary on the action – I particularly liked the use of the bit of Boccherini forever associated with The Lady Killers.

Bane generally plays festival fringes or one-nighters. It’s an act of some courage to bring it into Harrogate Theatre for five complete pre-Christmas cycles of the three plays. In the first cycle audiences were small (not Christmassy enough?), but surely word of mouth will bring in greater numbers. You need to concentrate to follow the narrative amid the mime and the changes of character, but all those previous reviews using words such as "remarkable" and "brilliant" were absolutely correct!

Bane continues at Harrogate Theatre until 23 December 2014.