Small Change
Donmar
War and Peace, I and II
Hampstead
Oh my God. Did that really happen? I knew nothing about Peter Gill’s 1976 play, Small Change, before arriving at the Donmar to see this revival under the author’s own direction. It’s a love letter, an immensely detailed and spectacularly superficial account of the working-class experience as related by four dimwits living and whingeing in south Wales. It may be a script but it isn’t a drama. Screeds of Dylanesque poetic observation are interrupted by shouting matches. There’s no story, nothing at stake for the characters, no suspense at all, just a pair of brainless rowdies and their battleaxe mums splurging out wordy tosh about their hopes and feelings and their thwarted this, that and the other.
The dialogue is crammed with contrived repetitions which I suspect are intended to resemble chamber music.
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