Theatre review: Barbarians (Young Vic)

It can't be the best sign of the state of the nation that Barrie Keeffe's Barbarians is being seen as highly relevant in 2015. There was a highly acclaimed Tooting Arts Club production only a couple of months ago that I didn't go to see, because I'd already booked for this one at the Young Vic's Clare: It's the JMK Award production, which I always try to catch if possible, and this year's winner Liz Stevenson surrounds the audience with the 1970s world of Keeffe's three angry young men. A trilogy of one-act plays, Barbarians opens with Killing Time, in which three skinheads have been unemployed for a year since leaving school, and have just seen their former careers advisor coming out of the dole office too. It's a grim setting but we're in a for a lot of dark humour as the trio make a bit of cash a different way: Paul's (Brian Vernel) cousin steals cars to order, and will pay the boys to call him with tips on where he can find the model he's looking for.

Non-review: Playwright's Playwrights - Abide With Me

In the series' third week it's Roy Williams' turn to choose his "playwright's playwright," and he opts for Barrie Keeffe, whose work he says showed him that theatre was the right medium for him to tell stories of working-class people. Williams directs a rehearsed reading of Abide With Me, the middle play of Keeffe's 1977 Barbarians trilogy. The turnout this afternoon at the Duke of York's was better than for the first play, but unsurprisingly not on a par with last week's invasion of Cumberfans. Of course, for the sort of people who booked these readings long before the casts were announced, today's lineup of Daniel Kaluuya and Sam Swann is starry enough anyway. (The third cast member, Morgan Watkins, I don't think I've seen on stage before, although his face seems familiar from TV - I'm pretty sure he was in the most recent series of Silk.)