In early new year, we play-goers hunker down at home. We shiver and fast, we murmur and groan. We sweat off the excesses of the Christmas wassail. No impresario will launch a West End opening with the audience in recess. And into this brief void surges the Finborough Theatre in Earls Court.
Fog is a brand-new play with an eccentric parenthood. Actor Toby Wharton and his mother’s lesbian lover, Tash Fairbanks, co-wrote an audition piece for young Toby’s Rada interview. When the distinguished panel of thesps heard the candidate perform his self-penned piece, they were so impressed that they commanded a full-length version. Here it is.
The setting is a London housing estate where various no-hopers are scrabbling around trying to escape the scrapheap. We meet Cannon, an ex-SAS mercenary, who returns from abroad to make friends with his children, Gary and Lou, whom he dumped in an orphanage after their mother’s death. Gary and Lou are in a right old pickle emotionally. Luscious Lou had to sell her body to survive the brutal care-home regime. Gormless Gary got shoved in a broom cupboard by bullies and had his arm snapped in two. Violence begets violence. Ditto low ambition. Gary is now a knife-waving thug whose sole aim in life is to purchase a large German automobile and cruise around London selling cocaine. All he’s got so far, unfortunately, is a tricycle and some cannabis leaves.
Gary makes sense as a character: a white kid enamoured of black culture. His best mate, Michael, is a jumble of illegible motifs. He’s a black teenage criminal with Home Counties aspirations. He’s brainy. He reads. He wears spectacles (underclass code for ‘genius’, apparently), and even though he deals crack he also plans to study psychology at Oxford.
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