Published: 11 March 2010
by JOSH LOEB

JEZ Butterworth is one of this nation’s most original playwrights. His characters seemingly defy categorisation by class, sexuality and even era, his plotlines can be absurd and he writes surprising, grab-you-by-the-balls dialogue like no one else. 

And, importantly, he is extremely funny. 

Nothing can compare with his masterpiece Jerusalem, now on in the West End, but it’s interesting to see some of the seeds of that hyper-imaginative play in this early work, given the great Tower Theatre Company treatment in the cosy Bridewell Theatre, just off Fleet Street. In a Soho club in the 1950s, a group of Cockney wise-guy gangsters (who shoot the bull in distinctly un-1950s parlance) backstab one another after their head honcho, Ezra, is discovered dead, in two pieces, in bins behind the boozer. 

These are not your Tarantino-style smoothies but all-too-human, and therefore faintly pathetic and neurotic geezers – most notably Skinny, who is well-played by Maxim Moya-Thompson (bags of awkward ticks and intentional but natural-sounding nervous stuttering). 

Baby (Cameron Robertson) is the most menacing of the lot but frustratingly little is revealed about the broken childhood said to have made him the man he is. And while Butterworth’s disloyalty to historical authenticity has its plus points, his failure to make these characters altogether believable smacks of frivolity.  

Though the finale is satisfyingly bloody, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that this is just a warm-up to his latest work – a poor man’s Jerusalem, so to speak.  

Is the price of such a universally acclaimed success that your all previous plays will henceforth be looked upon as poor substitutes?

An enjoyable dark comedy, in short, but not the author’s very best. 

Until March 13 • 020 7353 1700