You can’t have Mojo and your money back

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. Butterworth also leans heavily on Pinter.

The play opens in the back-office of a nightclub. Two pilled-up criminals are exchanging streams of lairy London chit-chat. Their boss, Ezra, has discovered a teenage heart-throb named Silver Johnny but rival gangsters are keen to muscle in and grab a piece of the star’s income. The details are hard to follow because the jabbering thugs leap so fast from one topic to the next. And the characters they’re discussing are off-stage. Two or three more villains barge in and out, swearing and swinging their fists. A few chairs get chucked. Someone swishes a sword around. These aggressive, dim-witted characters are not easy to sympathise with.

After an hour of prattle, a shock is announced. Ezra is dead. His unknown killer has taken the trouble to carve him in two. Are the police on their way to investigate? Apparently not. The halved corpse has been dumped behind the club. Next it gets dragged on stage in a pair of ash cans. Don’t ask why. Just give yourself a pat on the back for spotting the nod to Samuel Beckett, whose impenetrable fantasy Endgame features two cadaverous old folk trapped in dustbins. Very clever. In the second act, the plot thickens without becoming credible or gripping. Ezra’s son wants to seize control of the nightclub. Silver Johnny is suspended by his legs and tortured, rather ineffectively.