Bottleneck ****

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Festival 2012

EXCERPT: "Bursting with energy, James Cooney (Greg) exploded onto the stage, the hurtleneck speed with which he moved between topics and related his view on life barely giving us time to digest and react to the regular funnies he provided us with."

An hour long monologue, Luke Barnes’ play Bottleneck depicts life as seen from a fourteen year old boy’s point of view. Bursting with energy, James Cooney (Greg) exploded onto the stage, the hurtleneck speed with which he moved between topics and related his view on life barely giving us time to digest and react to the regular funnies he provided us with. I found it a fascinating insight into a different life and psyche, though I’d have liked to know how convincing a young Liverpudlian boy from the same background would have thought it. Swearing constantly and regaling us with stories of stealing and violence in an entirely matter of fact way, Cooney was also utterly charming, creating a sense that these habits were entrenched in normality, rather than being indicative of immorality.

Interesting enough in its own right, I was a little unsure where this one man show could go until it became increasingly apparent that this character was caught up in the Hillsborough disaster. The worst football atrocity in history, the cage’s capacity for Liverpudlian fans was wildly overestimated, causing 96 people to die in the 1989 crush. In this retelling of it, Greg’s asthmatic best friend is one of its victims. Cooney’s powerful performance movingly conjured up a very vivid sense of the blind panic, how helpless they all were, and, specifically, how very young the pair were to have to try to cope with such a situation. He doesn’t linger too much on his own experience or the aftermath and even his description of the wheezing, rattling and gasping noises around him is brief. By just touching upon such a sensitive and emotionally raw subject, Barnes' script leaves much up to the imagination and provides a nicely understated tribute to all those who died.

Bottleneck was performed at Pleasance Courtyard at the Edinburgh Festival 2012. To find out more about this production, go to the Ed Fringe website.