by Dameon Garnett
Directed by Claire Lovett
Designed by Paul Wills
Lighting by Gavin Owen
Presented by Northern Edge Productions
Cast: Tina Malone. Colin Campbell. Gareth Llewelyn. Emily Norman. Claire Sundin.
The world premiere of a new play
1 - 26 March 2005
TIME OUT CRITICS' CHOICE“Do ya think you'll ever ge' any genuine love from them kind o' people, do you think they'll ever really accept you? Wake up Barbie! You'll never be one o' them. You can't change who you are just by by changin' ya fuckin' accent…”
Following the Finborough Theatre’s recent successes with first plays by new authors, we again present a world premiere from a new author – Break Away by Liverpool author, Dameon Garnett – as part of our 25th anniversary season.
Leaving behind her home in Speke, teenager Barbie-Jean heads off to the sun, sea and sand of Torquay, accompanied by her best friend Stella and fun-loving, larger-than-life Auntie Pauline. Each wants something different from their free week’s holiday break - though boys figure high on the agenda! However, matters are complicated by an unexpected and unwanted arrival… Suddenly, not only Barbie-Jean’s future, but her whole identity is in question…
With a cast led by Brookside star Tina Malone, a bawdy new Scouse comic-drama - think Educating Rita meets Rita, Sue and Bob Too!
The cast includes Tina Malone whose many credits include The Word (National Tour) for which she was nominated for the Best Actress Award in the Manchester Evening News Awards 2002, Guiding Star (Royal National Theatre), Waiting For H (Liverpool Everyman) and Running For Cover (Liverpool Playhouse). Her many TV credits include Shameless, Henry V111, Nice Guy Eddie, Dinnerladies, The Harry Enfield Show, Common as Muck and Mo McGee in Brookside; Colin Campbell whose many credits include Having A Ball (Birmingham Rep/National Tour), A View From The Bridge (Crucible, Sheffield), and When We Are Married (Savoy Theatre) and many shows for Barrie Rutter’s Northern Broadsides; Emily Norman whose recent credits include The Graduate (Gielgud Theatre) and The Trumpet Major (The Bridewell); and newcomers Claire Sundin and Gareth Llewellyn.
Playwright Dameon Garnett was born in Liverpool. Break Away is his first produced play. His play, New Year's Day, was given a staged reading at the Royal Court Young Writers' Festival, starring Michael Angelis. He was an Associate Writer at the Liverpool Everyman, and has also received a bursary from the Soho Theatre. He has had staged readings of his plays performed at the New Ambassador’s, the ICA and the Pleasance, all directed by Rufus Norris.
Directed by exciting newcomer Claire Lovett who was Assistant Director to Terry Johnson on Dumbshow (Royal Court), to Lindsay Posner on Oleanna (Garrick Theatre), to Thea Sharrock on A Doll’s House (Southwark Playhouse) and to Rufus Norris on Dirty Butterfly (Soho Theatre). She has also worked at the Royal Court,, Soho Theatre and at the Lincoln Center, New York.
The script is published by Oberon Books. More details at Playscripts
The Press on Break Away
TIME OUT CRITICS' CHOICE
"With the right-wing press up in arms about the chav scum purportedly plaguing Britain’s streets, exploiting the welfare state and, most peculiarly, ruining our fashion sense, this new play from first time author Dameon Garnett about contemporary working-class culture in Liverpool feels decidedly topical.
Teenage kids Barbie-Jean and Jake sport the requisite nylon and Nike outfits, and, along with their father Kevin, have a deep suspicion of books, an impressive armoury of swear words, and no desire to climb any kind of social ladder out of their native Speke. But since Kevin’s wife mysteriously abandoned them, the power relations in the house have shifted, and when Barb-Jean’s apparently posh best mate Stella an proudly less-than-s, mouthy Aunty Pauline arrive with a proposed girl holiday to Torquay, things go horribly awry, sending Barbie-Jean scurrying for elocution, elocution, elocution lessons and, almost as an aside, a university education. Preferably at Oxford.
Notably traditional and lightly funny, Garnett plays with aspirational stereotypes astutely avoiding easy cliche in his characterisation, and his dialogue is often spot-on. Tina Malone turns in a mischievous performance as the defiant, irrepressible Pauline, and Claire Sundin’s Barbie-Jean is wonderfully self-righteous. . . Claire Lovett’s unpretentious, clipped direction . . ., Break Away nonetheless signals the arrival of a perceptively class-conscious and nuanced playwright."
Lucy Powell, Time Out
"In Liverpool the production of dramatists is virtually a light industry. But although the latest off the assembly line, Dameon Garnett, writes lively dialogue, his debut piece turns out to be two plays in one. It starts out as a louche version of The Liver Birds and ends up as Educating Rita. The first, chirpier, half is full of jokes, rows and four-letter words as two Speke teenagers, Barbie-Jean and Stella, are invited by the former's Auntie Pauline for a caravan holiday in Torquay. You know it's a Liverpool play by the fact that everyone talks like a comedian. Asked by her dad the name of the Wilde play she's studying for A-Level, Barbie-Jean announces it "Lady Fandermere's Wind." And when she tells him it's paradoxical, he says: "Isn't that when a tart dyes her hair blonde?" But, after tickling our ribs in the first half, Garnett turns all serious on us in the second by showing Barbie-Jean rejecting her coarse background to study for university. The change of tone is fine, but there is something depressingly negative about Garnett's assumption that Barbie-Jean's educational conversion is tied up with her failures with fellas. The big scene in which the foul-mouthed Auntie Pauline rails at her niece for betraying her working-class roots feels oddly dated: you would think no one from Liverpool had ever been to university. It's a ramshackle play full of loose ends but it has enough rude vitality to make one hope for better things to come. And Claire Lovett's production is more than decently acted. Claire Sundin's Barbie-Jean, moping in Torquay, is vocally full of the last of the summer whine. Tina Malone as Pauline conveys an edgy vindictiveness under the barrel of working-class fun. And Emily Norman decorously suggests that Stella is both posh totty and, in her friend's phrase, "the sexual equivalent of a combine harvester". Even if watching the play is like being bashed over the head with a stick of seaside rock, you can't deny Garnett's bruising energy."
Michael Billington, The Guardian
"
Liverpudlian Dameon Garnett’s first play - about a young woman from Speke escaping her claustrophobic family background - spreads its net too wide but contains cracking dialogue, excellent jokes and good characters. It is a promising debut and exactly the kind of play to turn apathetic teenagers on to the wonders of theatre.
Life changes for sullen Barbie-Jean (Claire Sundin) during a caravan holiday in Torquay with her loud-mouthed Aunty Pauline and posh, promiscuous friend Stella. Their week of booze, clubbing and sex in toilets is very funny but Barbie-Jean gradually realises she doesn’t like this blinkered man-mad existence and discovers - to her surprise - that reading books quietly by the harbour is more enjoyable.
She is studying Lady Windermere’s Fan for A-Level and Garnett transfers Wilde’s notion of high society, in which everyone conforms to certain norms and uses wit to cover their true feelings, to Barbie-Jean’s macho working-class family, where everyone sneers at book-reading and Pauline’s aggressive humour conceals deep anger. Tina Malone plays vulgar, gum-chewing Pauline with great relish and Emily Norman’s shallow Stella has just the right mix of teenage cool and naivete. Claire Lovett’s well-paced direction also makes the most of a fierce argument in which Pauline accuses Barbie-Jean of getting above herself.
Garnett’s point is that you can break from your past without disowning your roots. This is emphasised in the final scene when Barbie-Jean unconsciously abandons her new middle-class voice and slips back into Scouse as she tells her dad about the joys of reading."
Colin Shearman, The Stage
"Liverpool loudmouths in Torquay torment; a play with a ray of sun.
Mersey-baiting MP Boris Johnson would find plenty of ammo in Dameon Garnett’s thoughtful new comedy, brought to Earl’s Court by Northern Edge theatre. Its characters decamp from hard-pressed Speke to Torquay when Auntie Pauline wins a week in a caravan. This loud, foul-mouthed, chip-eating, low expectation single parent family is hard-edged and soft-centred as the Henley MP could expect to find. The only outsider is an elocution-trained bit of superficial pretentiousness the likes of Shirley Valentine would dismiss with a well-formed quip if she bumped into her passing through the Adelphi.
Pauline’s still young enough to be on the pull, and a woman for whom a sentence not incorporating a "fucking" is a notable event. The other adult’s Kevin. A gas-fitter whose wife’s buzzed off, he’s trying, however inexpertly, to keep his daughter Barbie-Jean on A-levels and Oscar Wilde, though when she opens the university prospectuses his not-for-the-likes-of-us defensiveness kicks in. Brother Jake lusts after glamorous Stella, whose slim-line elegance contrasts the other women’s ample figures.
There’s a sense of more to be discovered in the men; their quietude (despite Jake’s verbal attack on his sister) suggests defeat in life. Of the women, Pauline will survive whatever without appreciably changing, while Stella will trip delightfully through life, glancing off reality with a pretty smile and superficial comment as she riffles through pages of the latest glossy mag until she ages into mounds of cosmetics and ever more desperate attempts to keep up youthful mannerisms.
Barbie-Jean’s different (that name won’t last). Her brother’s tongue-lashing unlocks her resources. From the parroted lit. crit. of early scenes she progresses to a sympathetic plot summary of Lady Windermere’s Fan that connects the play, incredibly but convincingly, with her own family’s experiences. Claire Sundin moves from hair-styling, vowel-falsifying girl under her posh friend’s influence to a fully-realised individual with purpose, seemingly shedding pounds in the process.
There are good performances all round. . . .Worth seeing . . ."
Timothy Ramsden, reviewsgate.com