Bottleneck, Soho Theatre, London.

It wasn't until Greg, the thirteen year old football devotee at the centre of  'Bottleneck' ecstatically entered the turnstiles of the Liverpool stadium, that I finally realised which tragic direction Luke Barnes one man show was heading.
Think of a bottleneck and the image immediately conveys how a large group of fans went from happily piling themselves into a stadium to a fight for life within moments. A more specific definition of the term Bottleneck ; 'a phenomenon where the performance or capacity of an entire system is limited by a single or limited number of components or resources.' points more to the fatal ineptitude at the heart of the Hillsborough disaster. 


Whilst it may be the controversy surrounding the police management of the crowds and the preceding efforts to shirk responsibility that has kept Hillsborough in the papers, it's the ordinary people of Liverpool who are the focus of this piece. A range of characters, skilfully brought to life by the keen observations of LIPA graduate James Cooney, whose accent I assume was authentic and impersonations of local characters also, I assume informed by his own experiences. Through Greg, Barnes attempted to put a face and an intensely beating heart to the story of Hillsborough. We were forced to imagine both the horrifying experience of the event and the devastating impact that it had upon the lives of the survivors of the tragedy. The Hillsborough disaster was an incredibly sad event and the play succeeded in engaging empathy for those involved yet I did wonder what did we learn from this retelling? The practice of standing enclosures have been removed from todays football stadiums in response to the events at Hillsborough and no one is any doubt about who the victims were, but have we ensured that us the people are not again fatally flawed by the inefficiency of a single componant? I wasn't sure if this discussion was present within the play.

Before the final reconstruction the best part of the play is devoted to viewing the world through the eyes of Greg, an energetic teen, ignorant of girls and obsessed with Liverpool and it is as much a study of the world of a teenage boy as it is a disaster play. Mixed up in the barrage of his parents divorce and defining himself by his place on the 'The boot', the street upon which he hangs out, Luke Barnes explores the behaviour of the teenage male growing up on the streets of Liverpool in the late eighties. Free from the boredom preventing time consumers of the modern age; internet, mobile phones and Xbox's, Greg is forced outside and is perhaps more innocent than today's teen. Some of the language used and impressions of characters; particularly the savvy Girls, felt too contemporary for the eighties world that I remember growing up and I felt that the experience of the eighties was perhaps being created and performed by a group of artists disconnected from that age. With a creative team consisting entirely of young men, you can almost smell the boyish enthusiasm, the performance, script and direction all ran along at a fierce momentum which meant that whilst sometimes a bit frustrated, we were never bored.