Photo Douglas JonesA huge sell-out and award winning success during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2009 for Scottish site-specialists Grid Iron, Barflies is a visceral look at the pains and glories or drunkenness and all the humour, horror, hope and devastation it can bring. Read more …
Drawn from the short-stories and poems of cult American writer Charles Bukowski, Barflies is a rumbustious encounter with his alter-ego Henry Chinaski and a bevvy of the women who shaped his life and work.
Barflies is touring to pubs and theatre bars all over Scotland and signals the company's first visit to Wales. Be sure to catch it when it comes to a bar near you!
PLEASE NOTE: Doors open 30 minutes before performance. Please arrive in good time if you would like to buy a drink as the bar will close for orders 10 minutes before performance. 18+ Contains adult material
We are invited to consider whether human life is really all about sticking to the rules; or whether we can truly say we are alive, if we have never spent a few months or years dancing to that Dionysian rhythm, and paying the price, however fierce the final bill may be.
All told, this is another triumph from Grid Iron. A production which gets the details exactly right, as director Ben Harrison’s adaptation takes you out on to the edge of madness, shows you the view and asks whether you really have the bottle to jump.
It’s not merely a celebration of the drunk, however. Director and adaptor Ben Harrison has created a story ark which goes out to the edge and makes you realise that there is only one way to jump if you are truly going to go all the way.
Harrison's Scots-accented adaptation works better with the pair's sparring than in the monologues, when the original street-smart American rhythms can't help but take over. If there are moments bordering on knockabout parody, they veer just the right side of Bukowskian largesse in a rip-roaring study of wisdom through excess.
Surreal and tragi-comic snapshots of the underbelly of life, shot through with violence, tenderness, hope and despair, the production like the stories and Bukowski’s world-view that inspired them combine magic realism with Dirty Realism to great effect. Fans of Bukowski will not be disappointed, while those new to his work will be sure to have their sensibilities challenged.
Barflies does a great job at capturing the compulsive thrill of alcohol (never touch the stuff myself, of course), but the story it tells has little development; bottle follows bottle, girl follows girl, hangover follows hangover. Like drink itself, however, the performance is a sensory pleasure, vivid, vigorous and in vino veritas.
The performance is admittedly an engrossing seduction, asking us to reflect on the need for loosened values and occasional fits of impetuosity, but it always seems to yearn for an extra level of commentary.
Barflies comes with no salvation and no solution. By the time Henry and his latest companion stumble from the Barony in another hopeless cycle of self-destruction, Grid Iron’s deliriously raw and excellently-staged production hasn’t left us with any great message or lesson: but neither – thankfully – has it preached.
On Tour, from Monday February 6, 2012, until Saturday March 17, 2012.
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