Lunatics at large

The Dysfunckshonalz!; Some Kind of Bliss; William Blake’s Divine Humanity

The spirit of punk and its exhilarating lunacies are brilliantly captured in a new show at the Bush. Mike Packer’s affectionate satire tells the story of The Dysfunckshonalz, a major punk band of 1977, who 30 years on are approached by an American bank eager to use their best-known song to promote a new credit card. Bribed with a mountain of cash, the middle-aged stars fly to America to reprise their act. But at the debut gig their singer, Billy Abortion, reverts to his punk roots and sabotages the show by stabbing himself on stage and collapsing in a pool of blood yelling, ‘Three cheers for bin Laden.’ Instead of wrecking the band, the stunt relaunches them, and the play explores the competing claims of punk’s business-bashing ethic and the temptations of brute greed.

The director Tamara Harvey draws excellent performances from the band members and from Josephine Butler as a sexily aloof American PR girl. Pearce Quigley does a sublime turn as the stammering alcoholic drummer whose punk costume consists of a swastika T-shirt inscribed ‘Destroy’ and a black leather ‘Cambridge rapist’ mask. On the day of the London reunion gig his mother dies and he’s overwhelmed with grief. ‘If only she could see me now,’ he wails. As tears besprinkled his swastika, I spotted several youngsters in the audience who were utterly aghast at the arithmetic. Death plus rape plus Nazi symbolism equals comedy. It didn’t add up. But that was spirit of punk. Its hatreds were liberating, its hostilities all the more intoxicating for their lack of any governing rationale. This is a wonderful return trip to 1977 and, like all nostalgia, it takes you back but you don’t have to stay.

I didn’t particularly want to stay for Some Kind of Bliss, Samuel Adamson’s new monologue about a day in the life of a south London drifter. The character is shown dawdling towards Greenwich, pausing to muse about friends and relatives, buy dope, get stoned, eye up a few teenagers and engage in rough sex with a stranger. An afternoon like that might make sense if you happen to be a young London-based playwright like, er, Adamson with lots of time on your hands. What doesn’t make sense is to put those incidents and characteristics into the life of a woman in her mid-30s who works for the Daily Mail. That’s right. The character is a journalist heading for Greenwich to interview a singer and on the way she soliloquises about a long-lost uncle, scores some cannabis and picks up a boy in a park. She also gets mugged and steals an ice-cream van. Aimless whimsy throughout. I felt sorry for Lucy Briers who struggled heroically to give this dippy puppet of a character some kind of fibre and authenticity. And she dealt brilliantly with one of the worst audiences I’ve ever seen: a gaggle of snotty little girls all giggling, heckling and texting as if they were watching a trained monkey. But this sorry bauble of a play couldn’t amuse a handful of 12-year-olds. That says it all.

The 250th anniversary of the birth of William Blake fell last week, and the ominously named Theatre of the Eternal Values is celebrating with a show about his life and work. Blake’s associations with England are probably deeper than those of any other major poet, so it’s rather bizarre to see his story enacted by Europeans. His brother, who also had visions, is played by a Spaniard. ‘They do eseem estrange,’ he lisps to young William when the two boys catch sight of angels. And Catherine Blake’s French accent brings an unusual flavour to their first meeting. ‘Do you pity me?’ asks Blake ardently. ‘Yerss,’ she simpers, ‘weed all may hard.’

This is a hugely ambitious enterprise. It sets out to document Blake’s life, to dramatise his long prophetic works, and to stage his engravings as tableaux vivants. Dramatically the show is hampered by actors speaking in whispers and by the intractable nature of Blake’s later poems which are best known for shorter passages like ‘Jerusalem’ and for such booming epigrams as ‘all that lives is holy’ and ‘war is energy enslaved’. As a spectacle, thanks to the gorgeously austere costumes, the show works well and at moments attains real beauty. But I was rather astonished to see Blake merchandise on sale in the foyer. A tiny phial of ‘Jerusalem’ scent, £28. That got up my nose. Literally, in fact, when the eager salesman uncapped the bottle and squirted the stuff into my nostrils. It smelled of moral contradiction.