Review: 'Gutted' by Rikki Beadle-Blair, at the Theatre Royal Stratford East

Last night, I saw a new play, ‘Gutted’, by Rikki Beadle-Blair at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.  First of all, let me say that this play is fantastic.  The writing provides a rich, hard-hitting story with characters that are sensitive, funny and sharply realised through Beadle-Blair’s direction, and I was utterly absorbed by it.  Dealing with current issues, the play’s main message is told through the conventions of family, in which children vow to grow up different to their parents, yet inevitably become their mothers and fathers and repeat the same mistakes that they made.  The character Frankie, a transgender black woman who is beautifully played by Ashley Campbell, confronts the Prospect family’s mother and asserts that this need not be so inevitable.  She says that there is always time to learn, to “become yourself”, the real meaning of which I will allow you to discover in going to see the play yourself.

But, what this production made me think about, beyond denying the penchant I share with my mother for excessive stationery shopping, is the idea of a play having something to confess.  In this instance, the real issue is told in stark stillness and silence through the chilling words of Matthew Prospect, deftly played by the electrifying James Farrar.  Despite revealing that his father used to molest him within the first few minutes, the sense that this is a secret that should be shared and yet, is being kept, remains throughout the play.  Him, his brothers and their mother are desperate to talk about it, which sparks a conversation between the performance and the audience which is honest and thought-provoking. We are inadvertently asked, “What would you do?  How would you make the situation better?” and are ultimately brought to recognise similar instances in real life.  Orion Lee, who I saw the play with, highlighted that theatre is always about human beings.  He said this in response to the effect of such a minimalist set design, in which the focus was rightly placed on the characters and the story.  But it is in this respect that theatre is a reflection of ourselves.  I have been told, many times, that the story that you cannot bear to write is exactly the one that you should.  What do we have to confess?

The question of whether it is a sort of fate that we become our parents is left open to interpretation, but we are invited to accept that sometimes it’s nice to be wrong.  Have there not been enough instances, in our own lives, where we wished to be wrong about something?  Ideas change with each new generation which, with any luck, means that we will one day live in a society devoid of racism, welcoming gay marriage and accepting that gender is nothing but a social construct.  But, this does not mean that previous generations are too old to learn.  To be “set in one’s ways” is irrelevant, and as the mother of the Prospect family comes to realise, keeping the truth a secret, whatever that truth may be, is detrimental to progress and improvement.  As a society and as people, we need to talk, and listen to plays such as this one.