Reviews

Riff Raff

13 April 2010

London theatre-goers are pretty used to seeing Hollywood
names in lights in the West End. Now at the Arcola in East London film fans can
find another name from across the pond – Laurence Fishburne, best known here
for his roles as Morpheus in The Matrix films and Dr Raymond
Langton in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. But he is not
appearing in person. Instead, it
is a play that he has written – his first – which is on offer.

Riff Raff opens on Halloween with two
criminals, Billy, aka Torch (Eugene O’Hare) and Mike, aka 20-20 (Karl
Collins), stumbling into a disused crack-den on New York’s Lower East Side. They
need a place to hide having just robbed one of the city’s most notorious drug
lords of 3 kilograms of smack and killed his nephew into the bargain. Billy is in pain from a gunshot wound
in his hand while Mike alternates between taut anxiety – the sound of a rat
sends him into a panic – and fury with Billy who he blames for their
situation. They wait for Mike’s
old friend Tony, aka the Tiger, who they hope will get them out of the city
safely.

It’s an urgent opening that seems to promise lively stuff to
follow. But when Tony (Ariyon Bakare) arrives the pace falls away. The next hour is largely spent with
Tony and Mike reminiscing about how they met, got involved in crime and ended
up in prison together. There is some rather obvious exposition too as Mike
tells Tony how he and Billy have ended up in this mess: Tony actually utters
the line, “Okay and then what happened?”

In fairness Fishburne clearly wants to explore the ties of
loyalty and friendship between the three men, as well as the jealousy and
distrust that threaten these ties, and he succeeds in this. However, in spite
of first-rate performances from all three actors, the central part of the play
effectively slows to a crawl.
Spelling everything out leaves the audience little space to work things
out for themselves – a surprise from a writer raised in TV and film. Fishburne also gives Tony a curiously
out of place account of time spent living off the earnings of a woman
alternately referred to as “bitch” and “ho”. Although decorated with rhymes and
the rhythms of rap this contributes nothing to the story and seems little more
than a misogynist rant.

Changes in the lighting, well-designed by Dan Hill, go
some way to breaking up all this talk and the play arrives, via a couple of
clever twists, at its bitter end. The audience now appreciates the symbolism of
the rat heard at the start. But overall Riff Raff rehearses
a well-worn scenario with characters who might have stepped out of an HBO crime
drama. As to why it was set on
Halloween, the audience leaves the theatre none the wiser.

– Louise
Gooding