A wire fence standing in the middle of the Soho theatre stage separates Romany girl Pearl from council estate boy Joe, and the Gypsy camp from the rest of the local community.
But it is also a cage that traps the young Gypsy girl who is just coming to know herself.
Inside the close-knit community, with its strict rules of life, there are expectations of her, that she should marry one of her own who has a static caravan away from her current home, which is soon to be destroyed by the bulldozers preparing the way for the 2012 Olympics, the homes destroyed for “17 days of synchronized swimming”. This, they say, is a better life for her, with no need to travel or constantly face the threat of being moved on. However, the piece stops short of exploring the difference between living in a static caravan and a flat or house.
But the untethered life is the very life that Pearl lusts after, the life of her ancestors, of freedom and of nature, an existence where she is free to roam. It is Joe, the alluring, exciting, forbidden local boy from outside her community who can offer her this, and so, amid threats of violence and prejudice from both communities, their love story develops.
The story owes a little, one might argue, to the work of Shakespeare and, like the Bard, playwright Natasha Langridge is not afraid of using monologues to tell the story and let the audience into the characters’ minds. Alex Waldmann as Joe – part strutting, savvy street kid, part desperate romantic – was enthusiastically received following his energetic description of his grand, bare-knuckle gesture to win Pearl’s heart. Langridge’s use of Romany language gives the speech authenticity, but also makes the glossary at the back of the available script an indispensable resource to fully understand the play.
As we move within 1,000 days of the opening of the London Olympics, the bulldozers’ presence looms large over the play’s Romany community, but it is through Jade Williams’s performance as Pearl, full of pent up frustration and longing, passion, lust, innocence and desire, that the real loss of a lifestyle can be seen. The threat to freedom was around long before the Olympic bid was won.
MA