The Royal Court has something of a history of plays featuring young men and their frustrations about life.
Its latest offering - Simon Stephen’s Motortown - presents us with Danny, a squaddie returning from the conflict in Iraq only to discover that he has no place in the society for which he has fought.
Daniel Mays puts in a particularly brutal turn as the young soldier, returning home and stepping through a series of meetings that increasingly convince him England has gone to the dogs.
Finding himself as detached from the ‘normal’ world as his mentally-challenged brother, he proceeds on a journey that takes him from his ex-girlfriend, to a backstreet gun modifier, to a particularly distrurbing kidnapping encounter and then on to a couple of noxiously middle class swingers.
It is an unlovable country that Stephens paints through Danny’s eyes and there is very little that one can take from it other than his feeling of disgust at what it has become. Not that one can sympathise with Danny either, though, with Stephens leaving it unclear whether it is Iraq that has turned him into a psychopath or he was that way all along.
Stephens gives us a markedly bleak vision and one that could have entered the Court’s album of “great, angry young men”, but for a frustratingly episodic structure, which robs the experience of any real depth.
In the end it’s just a series of unpalatable vignettes. Mays excels in them certainly and is given able support but one is left wanting his world and indeed Ramin Gray’s Brechtian staging, to be fleshed out a little.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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