More of a lemon in disguise

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Lowry, to Saturday
ANTHONY Burgess started the modern debate about freedom and control: what kind of society tries to condition its citizens so they don’t commit acts of violence? Isn’t the cure worse than the crime?

It certainly is in Burgess’s novel, controversially filmed by Stanley Kubrick at a time when the “ultraviolence” and sex crimes were still a bit too rich for the establishment’s blood.

But to be honest there isn’t much fear of this Action to the Word, all-male touring stage version of the story breeding the same sort of controversy.

Despite the many-fold increase in violence on our streets since Burgess wrote this in the early Sixties (the show was intended to be a 50th anniversary marker), the stage production is a slightly sanitised affair.

No women means the rape sequences are of course rendered a little superfluous; the fact that the cast has to do the show every night presumably means the close-in reproduction of violence stays on this side of health and safety, and the transmutation of the piece into a sort of homoerotic commercial for Jean Paul Gaultier products — it’s all vests and tight pants — isn’t an easy change to the mood of the tale, though director Alexandra Spencer-Jones just about makes it work.

But all these elements combine in a short — two hours with interval — show that lacks, if you will pardon the expression, real punch, replacing it at times with an energetic sort of balletic choreography that might well fit the highly-stylised nature of the work, but simply doesn’t sit well with the subject matter.

Rising above this, for the most part, is Adam Search as Alex, the teenage delinquent/rapist/killer who while incarcerated becomes the first guinea pig for the aversion therapy designed to “cure” him of violent impulses.

The therapy turns him into the object of the title — organic on the outside, as dead as clockwork in the inside, but throughout it all, Search gives Alex a rude energy that overcomes the director’s heavy-handed use of parody and style.

The rest of the 10-man cast do their best with this middling writing — the focus is certainly on Alex and little else — but overall the weak conclusion of the book, that Alex simply grows up and grows out of violent behaviour, is matched by the weakness of the show.