Cannibals not such a tasty treat

CANNIBALS, Royal Exchange, Manchester
THE Exchange has gone from its record-breaking run of “To Kill a Mockingbird” to this rather different beastly entertainment.

And perhaps wisely, this one is 1hr 50min without an interval: not that it plays better that way, but it doesn’t give people much chance to leave at an interval.

It’s not that former Exchange playwright in residence Rory Mullarkey’s first full-length play is bad — just bogged down.

Mullarkey spent a year thinking about the work and visiting the distant former Soviet bloc countries in which it is partly set. Then he wrote the whole thing in a couple of weeks without any set idea of the plot.

The result looks like the writer wasn’t quite sure where he was going or why, and he spends far too much time among the rural poor and not nearly enough in urban society (supposedly Manchester, but not any Manchester I recognise).

Days from Moscow on the eastern edge of Europe, in a dirt-poor village (depicted by general mess and more of the wooden pallets from Mockingbird), Lizaveta (Ony Uhiara) is the wife of Marek (Ricky Champ), whose first introduction to the audience (as a twee, love-struck husband) is brutally cut short.

Thereafter Lizaveta’s life turns for the worse: she escapes from being shot, is caught by a friend of the soldier she just killed, sees her painter-friend dispatched without more than a couple of words being spoken, and is generally treated like cattle.

Which is the point — I think.

Mullarkey compares the grabbing of life to the consumption-driven life of today, but it is a fairly obvious comparison. Almost in passing we hear that in the Stalinist famines of the Thirties, people really did turn to cannibalism when food dried up, thus giving the title both a literal and a metaphorical base.

Uhiara cuts an interesting figure as Lizaveta, while the rest of the main cast — Champ, Laurence Spellman, Tricia Kelly and Simon Armstrong — make quite a lot out of characters given little scope.

The work manages to be both fascinating and utterly cold at the same time; rich in detail but lacking characters you care about — even a little.

It reminded me a lot of Brecht updated for the 21st century — and that isn’t really intended as a compliment.