Lucky, lucky, lucky...

Opening night of ‘Bouncers’ at the Leicester Square Theatre Basement last night. This must be one of the most compact venues in the West End, a tiny room with a bar in one corner, forty or fifty seats arranged in two and two-half rows, and a playing area fifteen feet wide by eight feet deep. A friendly and supportive crowd filled the place – I seemed to be the only person who wasn’t on first-name terms with everyone else – as the room was filled with former classmates of a couple of the cast. Having your mates in the audience makes for an easy show, but the cast didn’t need them; this production would have stirred the most hostile crowd. Director/producer/actor Antony Law has made an excellent job of turning a fairly brief play (usually played in a double bill) into a value-for-money evening’s entertainment with some inventive physical business, and like Kung-Fu fighters, the cast deliver the lines with expert timing.


‘Bouncers’ is an actor’s delight. Four cast members switch back and forth between a multitude of characters - bouncers, punters both male and female, a rancid DJ, and more – at the drop of a handbag, and when played as well as this was, it is an audience’s delight too. Simon Higgins’s Judd gave the impression of only vaguely being aware what century it was, Luke Stevenson’s Les looked like a psychotic Tom Stoppard, Anthony Law’s Ralph looked as menacing as a rat with a flick-knife, while David Bauckham was given the plum role of “Lucky” Eric. Eric’s not so lucky after all – he’s the only character in the whole show who realises that there is a world outside the nightclub, and in four beautifully delivered monologues, silenced an hysterical audience and chilled them with his vision of what the bleak world of discos, alcopops, and casual sexuality really looks like; not so funny after all.

Sure, the play shows its age from place to place. The two punks come straight from “The Young Ones”, and young women on the prowl nowadays are much more predatory than the ones on display here (or so the CCTV/Police Action TV schedule stuffers would have us believe), but the disco classics used in the show are almost certainly still being played every night in some disco around the country to this day. And the thought that nothing has really changed for the better in the thirty years since the play was written is a bleak one that resonates long after the laughter has stopped.