Early Morning, Project at The Mint

THERE was, some years ago, a vogue in jokes called cruellies, a typical example of which was the one about the Helen Keller doll: you wound it up, and it walked into the wall. An early play by Edward Bond, Early Morning, is the final offering in the season of Theatre of Cruelty at the Project, but it is not really in the spirit of Antonin Artaud, who founded that genre or philosophy. It is really a comic satire, offering laughter as an emollient to its often savage commentary and images.

It is, indeed, all laughs for the first act, as Queen Victoria is plotted against by hubby Albert, Disraeli and Gladstone, who want to form a national government. She has two sons, Arthur and George, who are siamese twins, and who have invented a dance called the hobble. Florence Nightingale `turns up to be betrothed to George, and is promptly raped - off-stage, mercifully - by, Victoria, with whom she then forms a loving and lasting relationship.

The palace revolution is a mess, and Victoria survives in power with chaos all around her. George is wounded, leaving Arthur to haul him around bodily until he dies, and then still in the shape of a skeleton, gradually losing bits and pieces to stray dogs.

For the second act, they have all shifted into heaven, where things are not as blissful as they might have hoped. Cannibalism is the norm, and pretty well everyone is chewing on someone else's arm or leg, if not their own. Arthur has gradually come to take centre stage, the bearer of the play's burden of commentary on life, pain, power, war and sundry interwoven threads. While laughter is still the means to the end, there is less of it and the message is more obscure.

It is clear that the play is concerned with deeply serious matters, but the author seems to have run out of creative steam in a finally incoherent drive for the line. He has embedded his thoughts in a particularly English set of characters and metaphors, which, like some local wines, may not have travelled well through time and place. But the writing has bite and quality; one is always conscious of a significant dramatic talent at work.

Certainly the play gives opportunities to a large and youthful cast to show their talents to effect. Robert Price has a magnetic quality as the troubled Arthur and Mary O'Driscoll is a wittily authoritative Victoria. Prominent among the others are Andrew Bennett as Gladstone, Michelle Read as a loquacious commoner, Tony Flynn as her boyfriend, Shane Lynch as Disraeli, Liz Kuti as Florence and Patrick J. Leech as Albert.

The play was banned by the English Lord Chamberlain back in the Sixties, which seems simply silly now. Perhaps the cracks in the facade of royalty had not yet begun to show then, except to writers like the author, who seemed subversive instead of merely observant. Despite its limitations today, I enjoyed his play for its fun, its intellectual energy and the creative production.