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Out for revenge: Kevin Wathen as
Jack Carter. Pictures: Topher McGrillis Get Carter
Coventry Belgrade
**** DESPITE the acute Geordie accent, you
have a faint feeling of recognition as Jack Carter (Kevin Wathen) fills
us in on the reasons for his return to the North East: a conviction that
his brother Frank, who died in a car accident, was in fact murdered, and
a determination to feel his way behind the seedy dealings and double
crossings of the newly emerging casino world of Newcastle and Gateshead,
track down the perpetrator and dispose of him. There's a feeling that, for all his bravado, Jack
might be a bit of
And indeed, so it does, for his erstwhile friend Eric (played quite straight, as an upright and a rather suspiciously respectable besuited southerner, by Benjamin Cawley), who turns out to be behind the murky business, in fact despatches Jack, not the other way round. Victoria Elliott as Glenda In fact, in Northern
Stage's production as Jack's first soliloquy unfolds - there are at
least two long monologues in the first half - you realise what the
echoes are. Ted Lewis, who wrote the novel
Jack's Return Home
on which the 1971 Mike Hodges film starring Michael Caine was based, was
an admirer of Raymond Chandler, and, if you replace the accent with an
American drawl, you realise that the long monologues and first person
used as a technique for getting into the mindset of the main character
are in places pure Chandler. Torben Betts, in his adaptation, certainly
captures that element to splendid effect. This is a man mesmerised by
his own mind, an operator who works by hit-and-miss, not without some
shrewdness but not the kind of brain to battle it out with the big boys. It's a world where
distrust rules, and there's always a knife ready for your back. I liked
Wathen's approach to the role, which is quite a
tour-de-force
for any actor, but I can't say he often engaged me. Authentic though the
Northern accent was, it requires special projection to be grasped, and
that was not forthcoming. The role is also monochrome - perhaps another
Chandler element; any variety comes from the other characters, who were
pretty good overall, with one outstanding performer. Even with childhood rifle in hand, Jack seemed
much like a cheeky chappie just waffling away. The worst thing is the
wearisome excess of expletives Betts allows into the script: as we know,
an expletive adds nothing, merely emphasis. Early on the script suffered
appallingly from this ill-judged imbalance. They weren't even funny. There were other drawbacks: the music was
supposed to be a feature, recalling the success of Roy Budd's quite
nostalgic jazz-cum-pop score for the film, and indeed, one did feel a
nice shiver in the spine w The touring set (by 59 Productions) - a gargantuan, one might say overstated pile of brick rubble supposed to remind us of the run-down, Gorbals-type ghettoes - played some role in creating atmosphere, though far more important was the Lighting Designer, Kristina Hjelm, who lit the stage proper with pinpoint skill and some staggeringly powerful use of shadow-images, but above all created a kind of glowering cyclorama above the brickpile whose colouring - greys and oranges, pink-yellows, or all of these folding into each other - generated its own really tense atmosphere that somehow enhanced whole passages of text considerably, literally colouring the words. Donald McBride as Brumby with Kevin Wathen as Jack Paradoxically, one of the 'other' characters who
had a marked impact on the play's unfolding didn't speak a word. Drummer
Martin Douglas, in between bursts of not very instructive but finely and
expressively performed material, was onstage virtually the whole play: a
gentle, not ghostly but supportive figure, representing the dead Frank. It was a clever device to have Jack address much
of his outpourings - party aimed inwards - to this dead brother figure.
Some of this, the more audible bits, Wathen managed rather effectively,
and even more important was the skill of Douglas in creating a totally
neutral, passive figure, whose presence seemed somehow to provide
reassurance, albeit enough to encourage brother Jack in his fruitless
pursuit. The pair played off each other well, and there was a genuine
brotherly feel created. Amy Cameron, Frank's quite sophisticated
15-year-old daughter Doreen, vulnerable to a nasty piece of porn
filmmaker's abuse ('How many blokes have you had, Doreen?' is one of the
more unsettling lines), but pretty capable (when not gagged) at standing
up for herself, was a nice piece of characterisation, as were the two
parts (Margaret/Glenda) played in an aptly feisty way by Victoria
Elliott. Donald McBride managed a triple role, at least
two of them sleazy, and appropriately meets not one but two sticky ends,
projected from an upper window and suffocated by a cushion. It wasn't
always clear, except to the initiated, which character he was at any
time, but his speaking even as a creepy villain was up to RSC standards,
which was certainly refreshing. But the actor who most engaged my attention, the
most inventive by a mile, was Michael Hodgson, who with a splendid
variety of hunchbacked and stooping walks played Kinnear, one of the
arch-gangsters, with a delicious laid-back manner and a sneery kind of
semi-northern accent you couldn't make up if you tried to.
But the treat was that he doubled this with Con,
a not so old (fifties) Irish gangster's hack given the task of roughing
up the girl but constantly putting it off and almost relieved when Jack
bursts in and prevents it. The county Kildare drawl, the dithery
lurching around, the self-pitying mutterings ('When I lie awake at night
I think of all the people I've murthered'. 'That's very civil of you',
he comments when the tied-up Doreen volunteers to suck his cock instead
of being maimed. It's pathetic but also oddly comic, and this and
several lines, a good many of them from Hodgson, remind us how something
we could have done with more of throughout this was comedy. One other minor role proved a treat: Ed Gaughan
voiced over by Sound Designer James Frewer as the nastiest piece of
work, pure Krays, from south London - Gerald ('You have committed a
Court-Martial offence'). Brilliant diction, but I wouldn't want to fall
into his hands. To 26-03-16 Roderic Dunnett
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a loser: a bit of a swaggerer, himself not averse to a
bit of stifling or pushing someone to his death, but a small time
gangster whose determination to stick his nose into what others see as
their business is doomed to come to a sticky end. 
hen The Animals' House of the Rising Sun
wafted across us, reminding us that that was originally a Newcastle
band.