The ObserverTheatreReviewLyttelton, London
An ex-con struggles to go straight in a vibrant New York drama
The design alone makes it worth the visit. Robert Jones’s set declares the idiom of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s 2011 play. New York interiors zoom on rails towards the audience: two zigzag scarlet fire escapes; a hotel bedroom in Times Square; a lush conservatory in Washington Heights. Each scene slides out of darkness, is rowdily animated, then slips back into the night. Each is as vivid and fragmented as the lives of the addicts (hooked on drugs or on each other) captured in The Motherfucker With the Hat.
Despite the National’s irritating decision to use asterisks – both coy and preening – on their marketing material, the title suggests the spring of this vitality. The lifeblood of Guirgis’s dialogue is the most expressive cursing since Shakespeare. I don’t think even the paper whose theatre critic was the first person to say “fuck” on telly will let me say what part of a nun a seductive Puerto Rican user wants to spit on. She is given a vibrant fidgetiness by Flor De Liz Perez, who gesticulates as if she were boxing with her own expletives. Rather than utter an endearment, she would “kick a three-legged kitten down a flight of fuckin’ stairs”.
For a moment it looks as if this might be a problem play in which two limited sets of language fight for supremacy. A dealer comes out of jail clean. His girlfriend is the kitten-kicker who snorts and cheats and yells. His sponsor urges a life of tofu, yoga and herbal teas, and talks about turning the page and facing up to things. Guirgis quickly unravels the simplification. Sexual betrayal and casual disregard show up the respectable as being less genial than they think, and everyone as being more multifaceted than they seem. Indhu Rubasingham’s rousing production irradiates every wrinkle of the action, switching on a dime’s edge from high comedy to desperation. The fights – especially one involving a crushed coffee table – are unusually believable (even the offstage one in which a hat gets shot).
The cast is altogether strong; for once, it is impossible to differentiate between native US speakers and the Brits. There’s a knockout cameo from Yul Vázquez as a florid body-builder, who delivers a recipe for hair restoration (it includes fresh harissa) and boasts of being a public notary. Still, it is the calm confidence of Ricardo Chavira (of Desperate Housewives) that underpins the evening. He is marvellous at showing what it is to be torn between clean sponsor and very unclean girlfriend – and bamboozled by both. Replete with his new sobriety, like a freshly scrubbed schoolboy, he is also collapsible and incendiary. He helps make an ending that could have seemed mawkish feel like a punch to the heart.
The Motherfucker With the Hat is at the Lyttelton, London until 20 August
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKuklrSme5FpaG5nmqq7cH6QaKSorJiav6fBwqScq2WnnsGpedOhnGagkal6s7HVopywZZKnwrWty6WwZp6lo7u6