Elicia Daly
Sophie Fletcher
Diana May
Christopher Daly
Simon Darwen
directed by
Stephen Keystone
In 1968, ten-year-old Mary Bell and her best friend Norma killed a three-year-old boy. Mary, who’d already strangled another boy two months before, was convicted of manslaughter; Norma was thought muddle-headed and found not guilty.
In the first half of Jack Thorne’s Fanny And Faggot, these events are reconstructed – the friends bickering and making up, the trial, the girls recreating the murder – as a kind of sinister schoolyard game. I was thoroughly baffled for much of these scenes, and it wasn’t until I got home and consulted Wikipedia that I was wholly clear who had done what, to whom, and when.
Adding to the confusion was the decision to mark one time zone from another by a change in accents: the Mary who sits cutting paper butterflies is a Londoner; the one in the dock is a Geordie.
There are one or two effective moments of clarity. At one stage Sophie Fletcher, as Norma, sits playfully yelling at Mary to “come over here”, then her voice drops an octave or so, her posture changes uncannily to that of a man, and all at once she’s a client of Mary’s prostitute mother, turning his attentions to the frightened child. The courtroom scenes also work well, perhaps because they are so unmistakeably moments from the trial, and it was happy respite to know what was going on.
In the second half, Mary and her friend Lucy are having a weekend in Blackpool where they’ve hooked up with an amorous pair of squaddies. They’ve escaped from jail, though this apparently isn’t as daring as it sounds: the wardens are, says Lucy, “quite good” about that sort of thing. We know it’s the seventies because the men wear amusing polyester trousers, and the candlewick bedspreads are a bilious orange. In terms of coherence, this is by far the play’s most successful scene: without the tricksiness of a fluid timescale, we’re far more fixed in the action, and thankfully the characters retain the same accent for more than ten minutes at a stretch.
Elicia Daly, who was remarkably convincing as the child Mary, has become an awkward woman with a bleak sense of humour; Diana May is effectively coquettish as pretty jailbird Lucy; and Simon Darwen as the aggressively sexual Ray makes such exaggeratedly blokeish gestures I’m surprised he didn’t fall over and chip his front teeth on the iron bedstead. Christopher Daly’s Steve makes awkwardly gentle overtures to Mary, and it’s a surprisingly nuanced performance – Daly has a genuine gift for comic delivery, but managed also to be persuasively unsure of himself.
We were joined in the audience by drama students from the Gateway Academy. I must admit the sight of two dozen teenagers initially gave me an awful sinking feeling, but they turned out to be delightful in every respect, and I got a great deal of entertainment out of watching the mingled horror and elation with which the boys greeted Norma and Mary’s repeated threats to remove their tops. They were more than happy to share their views: both the boys I talked to agreed with me that the use of accents was confusing, and that the second half was more engaging.
The play’s tone – especially in conclusion – is rather ill-judged. Though I applaud Jack Thorne for not having been po-faced with such a dark subject, I’d have thought it demanded more clarity and pathos than this. I winced throughout the final fifteen minutes, when the sight of Lucy and Steve undertaking a Carry On Up The Life Sentence-style liaison under the bedspread – complete with tossed-out underwear – made it impossible to empathise with sombre ruined Mary Bell, sitting on the bed opposite.
Though, as one of my Gateway co-critics quite fairly pointed out, you need a little light where there’s darkness, there was too much of it here, shining too unkindly. So a child murders a child and then another child, eh? Well ha bloody ha.
