The Brixton Boucicault

PLAYWRIGHT Fergus Linehan's adaptation and send up of Dion Boucicault's The Streets of Dublin, running at the Brixton Shaw in London, has attracted superb reviews in the British press. Linehan has put the play within a play and added music, couching the drama in a staging of The Streets by Boucicault's own company: "Linehan has added framing scenes of Boucicault trying to stage the play, tweaked the words to the height of absurdity, and added roistering silent movie accompaniment," writes Nick Curtis in the Evening Standard. "The result is cleverly ramshackle and hugely enjoyable. Parodying melodrama is easy, but doing it well is hard."

Kate Bassett in The Times writes of "truly funny over the top performances under Judith Roberts's high energy direction."

Edmund Kente as the evil banker, Adam Meggido as the satanic clerk and Peter Land as Boucicault are similarly praised, as are "the fulsomely thrilling suicide duet", Fo Cullen and Judith Paris. "The production is sharp in its satire of token sympathies with poverty," concludes Bassett.