Review: The Great British Lock In (Drayton Arms Theatre)

Review by Dan Sinclair

⭐️

Nobody likes writing a one star, it’s the obligatory introduction any reviewer gives, due to it being completely and utterly true. Especially when examining shows on the fringe/pub theatre circuit, it just feels icky. I love a satire, I love something that tells working-class stories, my stories, I could watch The Royle Family (and often have) on a loop. As part of their double-bill, To The Tooth Theatre bring The Great British Lock In to the Drayton Arms, it promises comedy with a bite. 

As you enter the space, you are warmly greeted into the pub, and the hub of operations for Timothy, local MP for Alderbrook North, with actors in character, there’s improv, off-handed remarks about Kier Starmer, the farmer inheritance tax, and it turns out, a character coming up to you and asking if ‘you’re one of these trans?’ As a start to the play, one that had not yet begun, it was not exactly the warm fireside welcome you’d be looking for, satirical or not.

‘Compassion isn’t carte blanche’ says Timothy, the cigarette chewing MP for Alderbrook North, a Northern town seeking independence from Starmer’s Britain. The golden ale flows, so does the hatred as Timothy continues to whip his constituents into a frenzy. But for this so-called local lad, who in fact hails from Basingstoke, it all starts to unravel when Jenny, a lefty liberal journalist, comes to do a piece on the town. And not forgetting Danny Hutton, a local lad who’s mysteriously disappeared. 

‘Channel 4 did that documentary and made us look stupid’ claims Shelley, but the mistake in The Great British Lock In is that they inadvertently have done just the same thing. Satire needs to be laser-focused, and instead, it more closely resembles the shotgun approach, scattergun, meaning everyone around Timothy ends up catching strays in their leg. But I need to emphasise that I do not for a second think this was the intention, a creative team packed with talented working-class artists who accidentally turned the gun on themselves, with characters such as Shelley dreaming of nothing grander than ‘two fruit machines’ in the pub, and distress over the interruption of Bullseye night. When you portray the working-class as naive, bigoted morons, and the leader as simply bigoted, it is dangerous.

For me, there was little to keep me going during the performance, with direction also hitting on a couple of mortal mistakes (eg: a Chekov’s gun that was never set up beforehand, a character tied to a chair with no back on it - meaning she could simply stand up and leave? A slow-motion fight, flat lighting throughout, music cues jumping in and out), the performance just seemed to be sadly lacking in the care and attention demanded by a piece with such high stakes. When it all comes to a head with the realisation of why Danny Hutton went missing, it feels wholly unearned and a means to an end of somehow wrapping up the play. Matriarch Jackie will tolerate the bigotry, but not a local kid going missing and her son going to jail. If this was an attempt to comment on the backwards stances held by many right-wingers, then it failed to drill home the point in its attempt to create drama and plot.

To satirise the racist and bigoted views held by the people of Alderbrook, it managed to completely miss the mark and instead - just simply parrot some pretty disgusting sentiments, and even play them for laughs. Racial slurs, homophobia and most everything else (but strangely, not transphobia, that was kept to the preshow) were spurted out, but why? We know people hold these views, we know right-wing politicians stoke these fires and keep them burning, so what is The Great British Lock In saying? I fully believe that the creative team had nothing but the best intentions, wishing to punch up at the right-wing grifters that surround us, but somehow, in this staging, it started punching down. It has plenty of teeth, but I don’t think it knows who it’s biting.

The Great British Lock In is playing at the Drayton Arms until 22nd November

Tickets from: https://www.thedraytonarmstheatre.co.uk/lock-in

Photos by Henry Roberts