Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

You can’t have Mojo and your money back

Jez Butterworth's play — with Cockney characters called Baby, Potts, Skinny — is a pastiche of a pastiche. But there's a marvellously moody cow in Tom Wells's Jack and the Beanstalk

Compelling air of wounded saintliness: Ben Whishaw as Baby. Credit: Simon Annand 
issue 07 December 2013

In 1992 Quentin Tarentino gave us Reservoir Dogs. At a stroke he reinvented the gangster genre and turned it into a comedy of manners with a deadly undertow. This new mutation looked as if it might be easy to copy. Many tried. Among them was Jez Butterworth, whose 1995 play Mojo takes Tarantino’s zany-macabre format and moves it to Soho in the 1950s.

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