Cathy, Cardboard Citizens at the Pleasance Theatre, N7

reviewed for The Times, 19 October 2016

 

 

Cardboard Citizens make some of the most important theatre in the country. That does not mean it is always the most polished consumer experience. Inspired by Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, the bulk of this homelessness charity’s work is therapeutic, workshopped in hostels, shelters and prisons. Now that Cardboard Citizens is backing a professional tour based on Ken Loach’s film Cathy Come Home, the result is worthy, if rather bland.

The playwright Ali Taylor has drawn on Loach’s original to create a contemporary Cathy, a white cleaner priced out of Ilford by a landlord who would rather rent to yuppies. The actress Cathy Owen (her name is a coincidence, it seems) is moving and proud, yet Taylor’s script doesn’t tell us much about Cathy’s psychological background, or why she has so suddenly lost her ability to cope.

With partisan predictability, the show’s politics pin the blame on London’s spiralling rents. That’s fair, but means we don’t explore knottier issues affecting long-term homelessness; the cracks between mental health provision and prison services, to name an obvious example. The usual clichés are ticked off: the evils of right to buy and zero-hours contracts.

Meanwhile, Cathy is a perpetual victim. She complains that her ex-husband is unredeemable, even when he seems to be helping their daughter (a convincingly teenage Hayley Wareham). How much more textured might this play be were she not proved right.

Where Cathy gets interesting is in the audience workshop after the show. Adrian Jackson, the director, draws on Boal’s Forum Theatre techniques to get us deconstructing Cathy’s choices. This is Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, theatre-style, and if Cathy’s thinness as a character hamstrung the initial story, it now allows us freely to role-play alternatives for her future.

Economists will groan at the policy suggestions bellowed by the audience in a final brainstorm — “Rent caps!” screamed our neighbours — although audience prejudices may change as the production tours.