Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2004

Last Night a DJ Saved My Life
Metro Gilded Balloon

Shirley Dent

I confess that any production that opens with The Clash's 'London Calling' is going to have me onside from the start. However, this production from the young Leaves on the Tracks company deserves to have people onside.

As with every young company, it is never going to be 100% sparkling perfect. The acting is very good and you can see the commitment of all the cast - James Brough, Hugo Cox, Barbara D'Alterio, Helen Elizabeth and Kaitlyn Riordan - to the production. But you also sense that they need another couple of years just to settle down together, to have that ease together onstage that is so hard fought for. Good luck to them with that.

However, it is not the acting that is the real find here. As regular readers of Culture Wars will know, we have a particular commitment to new and innovative writing. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life is the playwriting debut of company member, Gaby Crewe-Read. She should write more plays. This is a deceptively simple play that has real intelligence behind it.

Based on the potentially gimmicky concept of a talk radio DJ (Hugo Cox) who phones random numbers and encourages whoever answers to reveal intimate details about their lives, this is writing that aims to deal with some very big ideas and issues about the way people connect and are disconnected in contemporary society. Anna (Kaitlyn Riordan) is a worker at a refugee advice centre who is appalled by the reduction of the refugees she works with to numbers within a system. At the same time she is afraid of anything beyond her own isolation, being described as like a drop of water afraid to fall into the stream. She becomes obsessed with the confessional potential of the DJ who can make people talk, and feels betrayed when it becomes apparent that his ambitions for her are sexual and not idealistic.

As with Leaves on the Tracks generally, so with Gaby Crewe-Read's first writing attempt: what is really interesting here is not the polished product but the potential. There are some passages written with real sleight of hand, with an intelligent understanding of something broken in society and of the potential and desire of people to transcend that. There are also some passages that are just plain pedestrian. But let's not be harsh about that here. This is her first play and she needs to work herself into the position where she has enough confidence in her intelligent writing to take more of a risk in that writing and in a new production. I hope she is back at the Fringe next year taking that risk.

Anna's final comment after a failed suicide attempt that she realises the idea of somebody else saving your life is ridiculous, that at the end of the day you need to save your own life, is a point worth reflecting on till then.