Someone classified Sarah Kane's work, rather needlessly, as 'in-yer-face theatre', dignifying it as an official genre, on which tomorrow's drama students will presumably have to write their thesis.
This is Ewen Bremner, just before finding fame in Trainspotting, acting as Billy the skinhead, off to breakfast at the greasy-spoon with his mates, who are caricature-racists living in a spiritually ugly place. Ewen is not as credible as the rest of them, having to put on an exaggerated frown, full of self-hate, like George Cole in Minder, rather embarrassing to watch. The table-talk is all about what actually goes into a pork sausage (something we're always warned not to investigate), while one of them pockets the vinegar-bottle, just to top-up his yobbo credentials.
The business of the day is to upset a formal black wedding, with banana-peeling rituals and then a mass punch-up, where both sides give as good as they get. Back home, Billy exposes himself to the black girl in the window across the street, who gives him the come-on, and on a whim he goes over and rings the bell.
In response to her quite inexplicable remark "I'm black", he pounces on her, but then instantly becomes her slave, and she literally overpowers him - not very believably - with a sequence of humiliations, largely symbolic, such as tearing up his union-jack underwear and branding his back, slave fashion, with her name 'Marcia'. When he begs for more, she refuses, and is last seen bedding her white (female) flatmate. The desolate Billy goes home and takes an overdose, having to be saved by an elderly black man living in the same block (also not very believably).
The symbolism is crude, and the message silly and pointless - just Big Two Fingers to the white and the straight. Sarah Kane is clearly not a happy person, succumbing to her own fatal overdose at just twenty-eight, dying like a bee with her final sting. The happy outcome, most unexpected, was the romance between Ewen and Marcia (also her real name) that blossomed during the filming, resulting in a daughter.
The credits at the end give us all the production staff, but only six of the actors, not including Ewen or Marcia. Is that meant to be 'in-yer-face' as well?
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