If “a working-class hero is something to be,” as John Lennon once put it, there seem to be a lot of them about on the London stage at present. If not heroes, exactly, anti-heroes for sure. The latest arrivals are in “Yen” by Anna Jordan at the Royal Court.Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Sloane Square venue for a Caryl Churchill play downstairs about a quartet of seventy-something ladies enjoying tea and sympathy in a middle-class sunshine garden (“Escaped Alone”), upstairs in the same venue, two teenage “bruvvahs” are in a bleak “saarf London” house, swigging lager, eating junk food, sweating like troopers and watching porn. They happily kill enemies on video games until their pet dog gets too yappy for them, and then... well.This is fearless stuff. You get some idea when you know the dog is called Taliban and he’s called that because he’s brown and vicious.Jordan’s play is the very opposite of an easy evening of relaxing theater and edifying culture. It bears comparison to the likes of “Herons” by “in yer face” dramatist Simon Stephens at the Lyric Hammersmith. Stephens is Manchester-born and “Yen” also had a Royal Exchange birth. It also follows the Royal Court’s “My Child,” Mike Bartlett’s first play, and other recent shows at the Jerwood. All are uncomfortable plays about dysfunctional families that tell truths.There are obvious lessons. If kids watch video nasties they may become nasty themselves. Hardcore may turn them into sex offenders.The warmest that this gets is when the brothers introduce themselves to the new girl in town: “I’m Bobbie. As in Bobbie Dazzler, my nan says, although I don’t know who that is. And this is my brother Hench. He’s got a face for radio.”Their crazy, boozing, diabetic mum Maggie (Sian Breckin) also raises smiles with her jokes and tender feelings for the boys she has left to fend for themselves.Perhaps the closest thing to tenderness comes from the new arrival, well portrayed by Annes Elwy. Jennifer, from Wales, is also known as Yen, as in “longing,” she explains. She’s both attracted and repulsed by the boys who are full of testosterone but don’t have a clue what they are rebelling about. One might wonder about her motivation in wanting to help them: maybe she is sorry for them and their (unseen) dog, maybe she just likes Hench’s bare-chested yobbo look. (The two siblings hardly have a shirt between them – most of their clothes are at their grandmother’s home and she has run off with a new man.)Jake Davies is nicely inarticulate as Bobby and Alex Austin well conveys the confused hard-man Hench, later seduced by Jenny until he does his normal trick of wetting the bed.As one brother examines the other’s rash, one may be reminded of Virginia Woolf about James Joyce: “merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges.”That was then, this is now. Putting this poverty in the middle of London’s most affluent area proves that plays are not the sole preserve of the middle and upper classes.“Yen” won the Bruntwood Prize and it’s easy to see why. This is drama so razor-sharp you can cut yourself on some of the unflinching lines.“Yen” by Anna Jordan and directed by Ned Bennett runs through February 13 at the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court, London.
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