Most theatregoers using Southwark tube station on the Jubilee Line turn right on exiting towards the Old and Young Vics. That way lie Spacey and Goldblum bopping bodiciously in the Mamet play and Colin Morgan trembling angelically in the Babe play — American theatre a-go-go — with the glittering champagne atmosphere of the Old Vic (despite the worn-down interior and the dangerously threadbare carpets on the circle stair) and the ambient music and trendy buzz of its little sister venue.

Turn left, however, along Union Street, and you enter a different world of “real” South London pubs and fringe theatre of the impoverished and jolly sort, the brick wall and beermat job you even have trouble finding on the Edinburgh fringe these days.

The theatre I mean is the Union Theatre, operating these past ten years (and this was my first visit!) in an abandoned warehouse underneath a rumbling railway bridge. Black drapes and old cinema seats define the acting area.

And the play on the stage is a rough, raw piece of gutsy poetic writing by an ex-con, Dean Stallham, who now works for the admirable Koestler Trust, bringing prisoners and art into contact with each other. 

The novelist Arthur Koestler founded the trust in 1962 — his Darkness at Noon is a prison classic — but like so many good deeds in this naughty world it depends on the continuing kindness of sponsors and donors and other charitable trusts.

You’d only have to see Stallham’s play — and indeed his paintings on the theatre bar wall, two of them funny, bulbous portraits of Amy Winehouse — to know that the trust is not wasting its time.

44 year-old Stallham served two stretches totalling six years in Wandsworth for fraud and dodgy dealing in the antiques trade but is now clean. His play, Senti-Mental, is a strange, compelling piece about heroin, and emotional, addiction.

It’s not perfect, but it has the unmistakeable whiff of a play pouring out and saying exactly what it wants to say.

This is far less common in the theatre than you might think and I hope Stallham goes on to write more for the stage before succumbing to the insatiable maw of television soaps.

In Senti-Mental, an old dosser trades his low-life female companion to his own grandson for a bunch of keys to a flat. The new couple, domiciled in Brighton, have trouble maintaining their relationship through a shared drug habit and memories of their respective backgrounds.

Marianne McIvor and Nick Bartlett play these scenes with frightening intensity, Bartlett going slightly mad and delivering his final, torrential speeches stark bollock naked.

You leave this friendly, unpretentious venue thinking well, yes, this is what the fringe used to be all about. Bare boards and a passion and all that, on a minimal budget and non-existent marketing.

How refreshing…and there’s even a chap outside the entrance who sells really good cheese and pickle rolls and steaming mugs of coffee. D’you have a problem with that? What’s your game, then?     

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.