Down the hatch: Lowlife tales make for heightened, tragi-comic drama
An American poet and novelist, Charles Bukowski’s booze soaked exploits made Jeffrey Bernard look like an advocate for the temperance movement.
And his writings –specifically three short stories from the collection The Most Beautiful Woman In Town- as well as a number of poems, provide the focus for this revival of Edinburgh-based, site-specific theatre group Grid Iron’s 2009 Fringe hit.
The audience having got their drinks in before the show starts, once seated facing the bar, our attention is drawn to the figure of Keith Fleming, playing Bukowski’s fictional alter ego, Henry Chinaski, boozing and typing away on the barstool from which he surveys the world.
Meanwhile in another corner of the bar, Silent Dave, (David Paul Jones tinkling away on the ivories, then assuming barman duties), looks on as a succession of women played by Charlene Boyd come and go, engaging in drunken reveries, sexual desires, self-loathing and hard luck stories: their glasses always full, but their emotional lives decidedly half empty.
“What men and women do to one another is beyond comprehension,” says Henry, downing yet another slug of beer or a shot.
And it’s that bleary –eyed war between the sexes, as Henry encounters a self-harming, self-destructive beauty; finds himself emasculated in the most bizarre sexual way by a yoga practicing witch; and becomes low- life du jour for a literary type determined to spread word of his talents, that gives the play its energy.
That, and Bukowski/Henry’s determination to celebrate the liberating freedom his drunkenness allows.
“Some people never get to go crazy”, he laments. “What awful lives they must lead.." And you have to admit he has a point.
Saying that, while Chinaski- land may have an exotic, almost otherworldly, frisson to it would you really want to live there for real as Bukowski did? Just as not all poets are drunken bums, not all drunken bums are poets. Some are just bums.
Gail Watson earned rave reviews along with Fleming for her portrayal of Henry/Bukowski’s swarm of female barflies in the original. Boyd is no less convincing here, ironically only once overegging her performance a tad during dramatised story segment 3 chickens.
The show also assumes a Scottish guise and vernacular at various times in recognition by director Ben Harrison that Bukowski would have felt very at home in a Scottish culture where drink features so prominently.
Surreal and tragi-comic snapshots of the underbelly of life, shot through with violence, tenderness, hope and despair, the production like the stories and Bukowski’s world-view that inspired them combine magic realism with Dirty Realism to great effect. Fans of Bukowski will not be disappointed, while those new to his work will be sure to have their sensibilities challenged.
Barflies, Barony Bar, Edinburgh, until Sat, Tel 0131 228 1404. Then touring: Tel: 0131 555 5455. www gridiron.org.uk
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