by Lou Broadbent

Prepare for your jaw to hurtle towards the drug- and knicker-strewn floor. ‘The Present’, currently enjoying its first UK revival by Good Night Out Presents at the Cock Tavern Theatre on Kilburn High Road, packs the savage, sexy seediness of drug-fuelled arty-fartiness into a hash pipe and forces you to take a lungful.

John Lennon has been dead for roughly a fortnight. 18 year-old Danny might as well be too: he’s just violently raped his mother’s friend’s girlfriend while staying under their roof in Melbourne. Or so he thinks. He can’t be sure; he was quite stoned when it happened. So a frightened Danny meets Michael, who offers him a room and places him in the centre of his Melbourne: a bohemian playground where artistic and philosophical conceits justify the behaviour of Michael and his free-loving partners-in-crime, Becky and Libby. Tenderness and violence, vulnerability and dominance, utopia and distopia exist just a nanometre apart as the three toy with their prey, engineering situations which force Nietzsche’s return theory to play out for real for Danny.

Lennon provides the score to the events, which seem to be the lovechild of the two worlds of Danny’s dream and nightmare: created with his help, with his permission, but immediately unwelcome and disturbing.

The set is a white room, the components of which are shifted to become Danny’s room at Michael’s, and Libby and Becky’s flat. Its institutional lack of personality reinforces the feeling of detachment from reality Danny experiences, and allows lighting designer Steve Lowe’s washes of red and blue maximum effect during the latter scenes. Unfortunately, it does allow for the possibility of confusion at the outset. Michael finds Danny sleeping rough having fled his situation, but not enough trouble is taken to make the audience aware that he is outside, not in a white living room. Coupled with a slight underplaying of Danny’s initial desperation, it risked leaving us with questions as to why even Danny would stick with the dubious Michael, who can clearly smell fear and is strengthened by it.

Max Lindsay as Danny subsequently comes into his own and brings a normality, and, throughout the piece, a sense of growing maturity, to the lynchpin role. Adam Spreadbury-Mayer’s brilliant direction of some explicit, high-tension scenes allows for each moment of humour, tension and shock to be appreciated. When Becky meets Danny, who is looking for Libby, the scene becomes a delectably dark cat and mouse game, with Danny as the mouse who doesn’t realise the cat wants to eat him. Stand-out performances come from Shelley Lang as the dangerously unpredictable Becky, and Nathan Godkin as master manipulator of behaviour, Michael.

Thumbing through a copy of Nick Ward’s works (Faber, 1995), the Cock Tavern’s Artistic Director Adam Spreadbury-Mayer was struck by the need to find him again, true to his venue’s commitment to carefully selected revivals. And find him he did, over Ladbroke Grove way, overseeing an open-mic jamming session and operating under the alias ‘Banjo Nick’. Happy to come out from beneath his stringed-instrument pseudonym to aid the restaging of his successful 1995 Bush play, Ward has confessed that working with the venue was “like being young all over again”. With a film version of The Present in the pipeline and Nick Ward Scenarios, a new pie to stick an antipodean digit into, it seems unlikely our esteemed author needs any help feeling youthful. He has also confirmed that, after an extended absence from theatre, he is ready to return with new material. If it is as engagingly scripted as The Present, we’re in for a treat.

One feels at The Cock that one is experiencing a new fringe venue that has found its feet and begun to dance a slow rumba: the sensuality, violent outbursts and tease-and-run episodes of the dance are all reflected in the passion for strong, uncompromising, fearless work that GNOP will doubtless continue to offer.

A powerful script, perfectly at home in this up-and-coming venue that will reward the inquisitive theatregoer the journey to Kilburn.