THEATRE REVIEW: Get Carter

THEATRE REVIEW:

GET CARTER

at Cast in Doncaster

Until April 9

BEST known as a classic Michael Caine film from the 60s, Get Carter is also a book and now a stage play.

The movie and Ted Lewis’s novel Jack’s Return Home are known for their gritty realism, so how does the story work on stage? 

Well, as it happens, very well with a stunning set comprising a mountain of bricks giving the impression of a world that is crumbling and decayed. 

Add to that a hazy atmosphere, the actors performing in limited light, ample use of shadows for dramatic effect and the audience becomes part of an unnerving half world of vice and criminality.

The characters are hard and uncompromising, fairly unpleasant in the main, who think that violence and selfishness are the ways to get through life. 

The language they use isn’t that of love or respect or positivism but is very much of the streets, using words that are, to coin a phrase from a shocked old lady in the audience, “very low”.

Kevin Wathen as Jack Carter gives his all, managing to move his character from hard-nosed gangster to a man destroyed by his own obsession to revenge his brother’s death.

His character is certainly not straightforward. When he returns for his brother’s funeral, he talks to his sibling as if he dislikes him, but it becomes obvious that he really misses Frank who shadows him like a ghost throughout. 

It is a relationship more complicated in death than it appeared to be in life.

But it is the new relationship with Frank’s daughter that, in the end, knocks him for six as secrets come out and Jack begins to respect and care for her. It is this love which eventually leads to his downfall. 

He could cope with revenging his brother’s death, that fitted with his gangland lifestyle, but to add revenging wrongs to a teenage girl throws him off-kilter completely.

And his revenge is terrible and callous and gory as those who have wronged him get their come-uppence. Or at least some of them. 

But you will have to watch this excellent play to find out more about that. Nothing is as it seems.

Well-written and superbly performed by the entire cast, this is gutsy and compelling from start to finish. 

Having Jack’s dead brother shadow him throughout the story, almost like a Jiminy Cricket conscience, gives Kevin Wathen the chance to really develop his character.

Get Carter becomes almost a Shakespearean tragedy with Jack as intriguing as any Macbeth or Hamlet, and offering up the sort of grim destiny which the protagonists can’t escape from. They are all \a well, almost all \a consumed by the blackness and decay around them.

The play is very different from the film, but much more interesting and multi-layered.

ANTONY CLAY