Mojo by Jez Butterworth
Chapel off Chapel, Thurs to Sat, March 23 to April 1, 2007
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
The five men in Jez Butterworth’s black comedy, Mojo, are London villains, wide boys, dodgy blokes who skate on thin ice both with the law and other crims. The play has echoes of Shepard, Mamet and the English movie, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Butterworth captures the vernacular of 1950’s East End and kneads it into comic dialogue. Syd (Lee Mason) and Sweets (Justin Hosking) look and sound like a Vaudeville double act, their rapid-fire patter zipping along like a stand-up routine. The familiar rhythm and repetition of the cockney dialect translates into very funny, dysfunctional overstatement.
Their boss, Mickey, (Brett Swain) is a sturdy bulldog of a bloke who strikes the fear of God into Syd, Sweets and the rather dim Skinny Luke (David F. Passmore). The only one of the tribe that is not afraid of Mickey is Baby (Mark Diaco), the son of their unseen Big Boss, Ezra.
Everything falls apart when Ezra’s dismembered body is found in two bins behind his Soho nightclub where they all work. A rival gang boss seems the likely culprit and the motive concerns ownership of Silver Johnny (Felix Allsop), the wildly popular club singer who has all the girls swooning.
The gang scrambles to deal with the loss of its leader and to establish its new hierarchy. Swain plays the tough and dangerous Mickey with the humourless bravado of a man who knows he is in charge. Mason, as the pill-popping Syd, makes us believe, initially, that Syd might be capable of greater things but his panic at the new and bloody circumstances reveals his weaknesses.
Hosking plays Syd’s speed-freak sidekick, Sweets, as a smiling and deferential servant trying not to upset his master. Passmore makes the halitosis-plagued Skinny a whining, obsequious, resentful victim. As Baby, Skinny’s torturer and the most volatile and genuinely dangerous of these low level villains, Diaco is arrogant, supercilious and cool as a cucumber.
Terence O’Connell’s direction takes advantage of Butterworth’s swift dialogue and relentless pace. He captures the seedy 1950’s Soho nightclub environment that is enhanced by Cara Kushlin’s simple but effective design. The cockney rhythms are difficult to replicate but, most of the time, the cast manage to embody the frenetic babbling of the gang’s drug-affected speech. Mojo is a really entertaining roller coaster ride.
By Kate Herbert
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