Dakota of the White Flats starts from a Philip Ridley novel and detonates into a wild and riotously comic punk rock driven performance piece. It’s as if the Young Ones grotty student flat was invaded by couple of manic boot-girls, the alter-egos of (P)Rick and Vivian.
Presented by Red Leap Theatre
Players: Batani Mashingaidze, Ariana Osborne, Amelia Rose Reynolds, Lutz Hamm, Logan Cole
Director: Ella Becroft
The stage is set by small collections of supermarket trolleys, left, right and centre stage. They are set up as children’s imaginative fortresses. In the middle is a metal fish sculpture which could equally be a Monty Python or a Captain Beefheart reference.
Dakota Pink (Mashingaidze) and Treacle (Osborne) her best friend, leap onto the stage with electric guitar and bass and start with a manic little punk rock number. They may be miming the guitars, but their voices are real. They could be the Slits. Especially when the rest of the cast join in and the evening begins. There are a couple of guys so that probably makes them more like feminist punks Dick Move. There is a great picture of their lead singer in the Q Theatre lounge.
The music has been arranged by Eden Mulholland.
After the opening song the central prop is brought on. Designed to represent a tower block of apartments. Variegated venetian blinds on three levels which fold out into lounges, bedrooms and verandahs.
The multi-screen format of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window recreated brilliantly on stage and one of the most striking inanimate characters in the play. The set designer is John Verryt.
This is the urban tenement block or strip mall in decay. The over-arching edifice is the supermarket. All the other boutique businesses have left leaving the shells behind.
The time could be post-war England. It could Seventies Britain with its youth unemployment and disaffection. Where the Sex Pistols lived and exploded from. The fantasy inside the urban social decay mirrors an obscure cult punk movie Jubilee (1978).
Queen Elizabeth the First has travelled forward in time to witness London in the Seventies, where slums abound, and crime is rampant. A bunch of teenage guerrilla girls rule and rampage. She sees the iconic picture of her namesake with a safety pin through her lip. God Save the Queen!
Reynolds plays the dual role of Dakota’s mother Lily, abandoned by her husband when Dakota was born. She is also Medusa, a faded actress and beauty who lives in the apartments. She has a mystery that is hidden in her supermarket trolley which she travels the grey streets with.
The male characters come off as venal and narcissistic weirdos.
The Director and players have taken the source material and riffed on it. It springs forth and bounces off in many directions. Underpinning it is the source of sorrow for the two older female characters. What blossoms out is Tennessee William’s Glass Menagerie crossed with the Velvet Underground’s Rock’n’Roll. Lou Reed wrote his songs as novels and plays, and his original band are Godfathers to punk.
The play then becomes an Odyssey to the mysterious Dog Island. In the middle of the urban waste land, surrounded by a moat where dangerous eels’ prey.
There they must confront the mysterious Lassitter Peach. Where truths are finally revealed.
A lot is packed into seventy minutes. Music also closes the show and there are loud audience cheers to start and to finish.
It is tightly choreographed, and the occasional dialogue stumble is entirely punk appropriate.
Dakota of the White Flats is great fun. You need to pay attention to the narrative as it races along. Love the synchronicity of this season run as it is the year of God Save the King!
The show runs through 5 May. Tickets are available here.
Rev Orange Peel
