What do we want from theatre? The familiar or the unfamiliar? In Simon Bennett's Drummers, premiered by Out of Joint at the Traverse, we get a tough, rasping gangland argot, a good deal of shooting up of heroin and even incestuous male rape. The play may shock the sheltered, but to anyone who has been going to the British theatre for the past decade the world depicted is almost as recognisable as that of the French windows and anyone-for-tennis? dialogue of the early 50s.
Bennett, who did two years' bird for burglary and whose first play this is, creates a plausible world on stage. He sets most of the action in a south London pool hall where Pete, a bullshitting fence, receives stolen goods from Ray, a housebreaker (or drummer) who has lately done three years in jail. Both have family problems. Pete is under the thumb of a domineering father. And Ray is rejected by his passionately religious mother and knows that he is being ripped off by his brother, Barry, to finance the heroin habit he shares with Pete.
I wouldn't deny for a second the authenticity of Bennett's world. The gangland slang, the double-dealing, the drug-dependence and even the occasional yearnings for a better world all strike true: the scene where Ray pauses in the midst of a country-house robbery to savour an exotically fragrant tea is richly funny before it climaxes in violent fraternal rape. But while Bennett knows about life he is also clearly enthralled by art. You can see the visible influence of Jez Butterworth's Mojo, Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking and, most especially, of early Bond in the scenes of domestic inarticulacy. These are not bad masters to have; but Bennett, if he is to develop, needs to throw away the rule-book and acquire a unique voice.
He is lucky to have Max Stafford-Clark as his director: as always he pares every scene down to its ultimate point and he ensures that the final mother-son confrontation reeks of oblique, unspoken love.
Nathalie Gibbs's set, with its stencilled images on sliding screens, also has the right bleak seediness and Peter Sullivan as the recidivist although aspirant Ray, Callum Dixon as his callow, exploited brother and Paul Ritter as the druggy, dead-eyed fence are all first-rate. It's a decent enough debut: Bennett needs to shed his theatrical mentors and trust his imagination.
I got more pleasure out of Aileen Ritchie's The Juju Girl, also at the Traverse, precisely because it took me into an unfamiliar world. You could argue that the play owes something to Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine in its blend of colonial and sexual politics and to Stoppard's Arcadia in its juxtaposition of two linked, but different, worlds. But Ritchie, a young Scottish writer and film-maker, doesn't merely tell us what we know but surprises us, at a time when virtue is often mocked, by her sympathetic treatment of her missionary heroine.
Actually, Ritchie has two heroines. Kate is a feisty Glaswegian who in 1999 makes a pilgrimage to Zimbabwe to scatter her grandmother's ashes in the land where she long lived; Catherine in 1929 Rhodesia is the self-same grandmother who worships her Christian father's memory and who plans to carry on his missionary work.
Ritchie forges fascinating contrasts and parallels between the two women. Kate is sceptical and sexually independent, where Catherine is devout and initially dutiful. But both seek to impose on Africa their own Scottish liberal or religious values: Ritchie's point seems to be that, to understand Africa, you have to shed dogmatic baggage.
With its 48 scenes, the play straggles. But Susan Vidler does an extraordinary job as the dual heroines switching between religious purity and streetwise canniness while suggesting the two women share an underlying toughness. Derek Riddell also doubles neatly as an earnest minister and a racist backpacker and Kolade Agboke is sharply funny as a hip Zambian pilot. It's not a perfect play but it has the great merit of mixing first-hand observation of the present with imaginative exploration of the past.
