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prospect of facing the everyday. We all should feel the same longing to repeat the buzz of connection when the ’sacred’ boundaries are redrawn at Hyde Park Corner and people—Speakers and spectators —can play again. Like the Speakers, he audience walk away from the drama and back into their humdrum problems and monologues and obsessions. Lomas pronounces the epitaph on all of us as he leaves the park with Cafferty. ’There are so many people now, Cafferty, so many ignorant, illogical, boring people forced to register their private decay ... ’ London’s most celebrated street theatre has been brought indoors; and up to a point you react as if this really were Speakers’ Corner. It is hard to look actors in the eyes when they come round begging and selling newspapers. Otherwise this brilliant first production by the Joint Stock Theatre Group puts a tourist cliché into startlingly fresh prspecive. The spectators are on show no less than the spearkes and we make a lifeless comparison with therh. Also, unlike the real thing, the act of public speaking acquires a sense of mystery. These ragged figures, speaking in tongues, pouring out crazy autobiographies, are possessed by some driying force which ordinary people lack ; they are not simply putting on a madhouse sideshow. William Gaskill and Max Stafford-Clark’s production is adapted from Heathcote Williams’s fiction-documentary, The Speakers. Williams took real models and named names; but they are also creatures of the imagination. Like the characters in his plays they emit a phosphorescent, flare as if their life cycle had accelerated to the point of combustion. The show dwells on three of them; a stateless central European who thunders out excellent reasons for demolishing prisons; the tattooed van Dyne with his fantastic memories of Sing Sing as a crony of AI Capone, and, arising from the grave, Billy Mac Guinness (on whom Williams based a character in AC ¡DC), the self-styled King of the
Gypsies who gets high on everything from hunger to meths, and couples’an Olympian gutter wit with obscure spiritual longings that drove him to walk to Liverpool carrying a cross. Tony Rohr plays him as a black, filthy Irish Villon and if the real Mac Guinness had greater charisma he must have electiocuted people on the spot. Oliver Cotton and Paul Freeman, as the other two speakers, sustain complete credibility at close quarters and rise to extravagant climaxes in mid-spiel. The device of introducing an observer to talk to them over cafe tables is unsatisfactory, especially as it does not take you any further о towards understanding their mystery. But the production’s shift from simulataneous harangues to separate scenes all over the floor is beautifully organized. «a valued leaps on a soap box to harangue us about the years he spent in Sing-Sing with the Rosenbergs. A fey eccentric with a toy windmill stuck in his bowler politely inquiries if anyone wants to whip him for £2, A ragged Irishman tells of the time he went with a tart who, the morning after, asked » What about the money?«. » You were that kind and nice.« he replied, »/ wouldn’t dream of taking a penny.« This is the prelude to » The Speakers,« a remarkable theatrical experience freely adapted by William Gaskill and Max Stafford-Clark from the book by Heathcote Williams. But although it sounds like a piece of grainy documentary reportage, with the audience playing the part of itinerant Hyde Park rubber-neckers, it in fact has a strong from and theme. The form comes from the attempt of a potential speaker to get to know the people before committing himself to the soap box: the underlying theme is whether Speakers’ Corner is genuine proff of English liberty or simply a tourist showpiece where a lot of selfconscious loonies can parade their eccentricities. Faithfully imitating life, the show is in fact a carefully-controlled piece of art. The overwhelming impression it left on me was that Speakers’ Corner is not simply a Tourist Board godsend but a place where naked human desperation is on display weekly: a modern Bedlam, if you like. The drug taking, dosshouse Irishman, the tattooed ex-Capone sidekick (»I was Public Enemy No. 6«), the stateless, demagogic driving instructor all emerge as people who find needed therapy in the soap box and a relief from their aching personal solitude. Hyde Park on Sunday, the creators suggest, will never be the place where revolutions are born; but it still provides a valued