The Blue Orange Theatre in Birmingham’s now-trendy Jewellery Quarter is fast making a name for itself as the place to see new drama. There’s been some great stuff on there during the year and The Wages of Sin, a new triple bill by The Naughty Boys was no exception.
The first half gave us a duo of plays by up and coming Midlands’ writer Martin Drury set in the hinterland of late Victorian society.
Looking After Business began fashionably in the bar before the audience really knew what was happening. This intriguing slice of nineteenth century life concerned a lady of the night and her middle class punter in a feminist re-working of the oldest story on earth.
Joanne Billingham was monumentally forceful as Ruby the businesslike tart completely at home with the economic truths of the Victorian underbelly while James Parsons as her regular middle-class punter Tench was suitably abashed when she challenged his assumptions and expectations. Gemma Kenny as his maid Maisie made a fine fist of exhibiting the reluctance of a “good girl” confronted by Ruby’s economically shrewd career advice that if a Victorian woman’s stock-in-trade was virtue, it was also hers to sell.
This set us up nicely to be ushered into the auditorium for Mr. Drury’s second play of the night, Nibbling Away, a miniature masterpiece that took a Wildean delight in the coded ambiguities of language. Here the author managed to mint new aphorisms in way that was entirely fresh and original. Its portrait of a fin de siècle Sapphic triangle allowed full reign to his ability to intrique, surprise and engross while giving the actors full scope to make these unusual roles their own.
Joanne Billingham was fully assured as Lizzie the proto-drag king while Gemma Kenny once again played the ingénue, this time with stays of steel. Therese Collins shimmered, twisting this way and that as the worldly upper-class Lesbian who finds a way for everyone to have it all.
Double Exposure by Birmingham playwright Gareth Owen mined some of the same territory but dating from the seventies it was by comparison rather showing its age, parodying as it did everything from The Plough and The Stars through Round The Horne via The Irish RM to Monty Python, Brass, and probably plenty more I didn’t spot. This was the Achilles’ heel of the piece – the parody horse has long bolted from many of these dramatic clichés, inviting unsympathetic comparison to the freshness and originality of the first two plays.
The excellent James Parsons as photographer Ivor Pennypiece had an exhaustingly long role which only his charm prevented from tiring us out while Therese Collins was a wonderfully caricatured housekeeper, Pickles, who could have been the mother, or at least the half-sister of Craggy Island’s Mrs Doyle.
