Edinburgh review: Ten Storey Love Song (Pleasance Dome)
At first this show from the Hull-based Middle Child company looks as if it is going to be a coruscating picture of disillusioned, post-industrial, Brexit-voting Britain, as it zooms into its setting in Peach House, Middleborough – where 65 per cent of the population voted for out.
But it’s not really that. Rather this raucous, vigorous adaptation by Luke Barnes of Richard Milward’s cult novel is what the title suggests: an unlikely love story set among the forgotten under class, where a girl who works in a sweet shop is going out with an impoverished artist, and living below a drug dealer and his sexually under-fulfilled girlfriend.
Events take predictable and unpredictable turns. The artist finds success but loses his soul; the drug dealer learns there is more to sexual prowess than the wham bam techniques he has seen on the online porn sites. There is a lot of sex, and not much social comment, and it all ends well, even sentimentally, except for the racist who lives upstairs and is horribly punished for his views and his loneliness.
The whole thing – performed around microphones with rushing films being projected behind them and music underlining every scene – is loud and crude but in a good way. Its shafts of insight – "all I want is for something to make me feel less pointless" – tend to be submerged beneath the welter of energetic rushing around and shouting, but that doesn’t make them any less pertinent or keenly observed.
The cast fling themselves into their roles, making excellent physical use of a limited space, and creating vivid characters without a huge amount of material to help them. It isn’t sophisticated story-telling but it’s hard to resist its pure visceral punch.
Ten Storey Love Song runs at the Pleasance Theatre at 5.20pm until 29 August.
