Writer: Errol McGlashan
Words are as addictive as drugs in Errol McGlashan’s one-man prison play Something To Take Off The Edge appearing at many of the Camden Fringe venues this August. McGlashan is an entertaining and warm performer and his play starts explosively. However, it suffers from being overlong.
Running at 80 minutes, Something To Take Off The Edge could do with some edits, especially in the middle where McGlashan’s Ezra is teaching cellmate Tel the joys of literacy. This section is slow as compared to the beginning which drops the audience right into the complexities and rivalries of prison life during the 1980s.
Tel has persuaded Ezra to get a wrap of heroin from top dog Diesel who runs the block where Ezra is imprisoned for life. The only problem is that Tel and Ezra have nothing to trade for the scag. They already owe Diesel, and it’s unlikely that he’ll give them anything more on tick.
The only bargaining chip they have, other than the biscuits that Tel always has stored under his bed, is that the next day Tel is getting a visitor; his mother and she’s promised to smuggle in a package. If Diesel could just wait one more day to get paid then life would be sweet.
Ezra and Diesel are both great characters, full of verve. Ezra reads to take off the edge of prison life. He quotes Shakespeare and reads the Bible more for its poetry than its message. Diesel is Jamaican and throws around the insults ‘Pussyio’ and ‘Bloodclaat’ as well as his fists. These opening minutes where Ezra is trying to score are full of drama.
But this exciting set-up is undermined when the action shifts back a few years to tell the story of how Tel’s heart is broken. It’s a bittersweet tale, but unfortunately not as gripping as the first unfinished narrative. Also, compared to Ezra and Diesel, Tel just doesn’t feel real enough. We learn too little of him to care about his fate.
There are a lot of words in McGlashan’s play and sometimes he’s in too much of a hurry to deliver them. However, the variations in pace and metre ensure that the words are always worth listening to. Some lines rhyme directly while the rhymes in other lines are pleasingly more subtle. For a show where Shakespeare is a direct influence, surely some of it is written in iambic pentameter too, so smoothly does it flow.
McGlashan spent time in prison during the 1980s and his experiences there give his play a vivid sense of verisimilitude. Occasionally, his character Ezra uncomfortably steps out of the 1980s to retrospectively diagnose a fellow prisoner with a twenty-first-century condition, breaking the spell a little. However, it is always Ezra whom we are interested in, even though the play’s main protagonist is Tel with Ezra acting as the chorus.
To keep to the play’s prison themes, the audience needs a shorter sentence in the clink if Something To Take Off The Edge is to really succeed. But you couldn’t ask for a more generous cellmate.
Runs until 27 August 2023
Camden Fringe runs until 27 August 2023
