BONNIE AND CLYDE AT THE TOWN AND GOWN

The outlaws Bonnie and Clyde lived lives less ordinary; they tell us so at the beginning of Adam Peck’s play. The two-hander, written in 2010, is the latest in-house production directed by Karl Steele, the manager at Cambridge’s wonderful pub theatre. The exploits of the notorious gangsters’ rampage of bank robberies and murders in 1930s Dixieland are well known – hands up if you haven’t seen the 1967 movie with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway? But here, Peck eschews the obvious and tells an intimate story of Clyde and Bonnie’s last hours holed up in a remote barn evading the law while they can. Forget the romanticised Hollywood version, look the other way at the spate of killings and what we have left are two vulnerable young people left stranded physically (both nurse terrible gunshot wounds) and emotionally. The play focuses on two lives that in fact were surprisingly ordinary.

There is a simple yet surprising set – the studio theatre’s floor covered in sand, walled in by brown paper sheets and a stack of hay doubling as the couple’s getaway car that in the end got them away -  from life. Sharni Tapako-Brown captured the complexities of Bonnie’s character with compelling ease: now coquettishly flirtatious, now vain, now angry, now warm and tender. With her gammy leg brushing the sand and her dreams of a simpler life away from the guns and towards a kind of homespun normality, Tapako-Brown’s Bonnie is a fully rounded character,  one that we could easily like. It was a performance brimming with humanity and though we never really understand much of her background, we see that Bonnie is trapped and there is no way out except in a coffin.

James Edge as Clyde was equally mesmerising. Here was no gun-toting villain but a vulnerable young man who dreamt of being an eagle but whose life chances swooped down to violent crime. There were moments of humour and tender affection: Bonnie enjoys reading about their exploits in the local newspaper, Clyde can’t help but tease his partner about the grisly fate of her pet mouse. Yet as they eat their meagre meal from cold tin cans, there is a growing feeling that the old barn is more like a cell on death row. They know that their evasion of the law cannot go on forever. Bonnie wants to be buried with Clyde, he is reluctant. There is a deeply touching mock wedding in which the pair tenderly express their marriage vows knowing that ‘till death do us part’ won’t be long a coming. There is sexual tension in the air, a whiff of impotence, painful frustrations and a realisation that dreams now remain out of reach.

I thoroughly enjoyed this play and the warm-hearted performances that brought real depth and emotional punch to a well-trodden story. As a piece of satisfying theatre beautifully wrought, it is far from being ordinary..

Performances at the Town and Gown Pub Theatre, 8pm until Saturday. Tickets £15.

https://www.townandgown.co.uk/theatre/