You can’t have Mojo and your money back

In 1992 Quentin Tarentino gave us Reservoir Dogs. At a stroke he reinvented the gangster genre and turned it into a comedy of manners with a deadly undertow. This new mutation looked as if it might be easy to copy. Many tried. Among them was Jez Butterworth, whose 1995 play Mojo takes Tarantino’s zany-macabre format and moves it to Soho in the 1950s. Butterworth also leans heavily on Pinter.

The play opens in the back-office of a nightclub. Two pilled-up criminals are exchanging streams of lairy London chit-chat. Their boss, Ezra, has discovered a teenage heart-throb named Silver Johnny but rival gangsters are keen to muscle in and grab a piece of the star’s income. The details are hard to follow because the jabbering thugs leap so fast from one topic to the next. And the characters they’re discussing are off-stage. Two or three more villains barge in and out, swearing and swinging their fists.