In the upstairs room of Manchester's Seven Oaks pub, a talented cast of three performed the latest offering from Room 5064 productions - a local theatre company headed by local impresario Gareth Kavanagh. This one act play, lasting just shy of 50 minutes was titled, 'Hair Of the dog', and was ostensibly set in a seedy locale in 1970s Soho.
Directed by Kerry Ely, this three-hander was part comedy and part social commentary on the ideas and mores of the time, as we see an actor (mainly voice-over artist) - performed with glee and flamboyance by Jonathon Carley, very fond of his drink and a little down on his uppers, converse with regular of the pub, and homosexual painter, (Richard Unwin), and his latest 'conquest', a Marxist styled intellectual played rather straight by Adam Gardiner. Unwin's gay overtones were nicely underplayed and were absolutely of the era.
The play is rather static, and indeed there is little or no movement at all for long sections of dialogue, and the play really does not have any real grit to it - it just bobs along quite nicely from start to finish with no surprises and no revelations. There are some very nice dialogue interchanges and the odd phrase such as, "excess is the only satisfactory amount of anything" standing out; but generally, the play does not say anything new, nor challenge us in any way. Even the news of Archie's murder meets them, and us, with little more than a cursory acknowledgement.
The strangest part of this play however was in the fact that our protagonist, the Actor, was cognisant of the audience's existence, and referred to us and talked to us about what was happening on stage at certain points throughout, and the other two actors observed the fourth wall at all times, and so this juxtaposition was extremely strange.
Well acted, and costumes, lighting and mood reflected the period and milieu nicely. It needs more to it though before it can move forward.
Reviewer - Alastair Zyggu
on - 24.3.26
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