Barbarians, Former Central School of St Martin's, London, review: Unforgettable show with unflaggingly brilliant dialogue

This reviewer was immured in the monomania of Finals' revision in the summer of 1977; the Queen's Jubilee seemed like a phantom event unfolding like an irrelevant dream outside the pale of my privileged imprisonment. So one of the strange things for me about this superlative revival, directed by Bill Buckhurst, of Barrie Keefe's great trilogy is that it feels like fictive time-travel back to the era of punk and head-banging desperation, with unemployment rising and the pound descending to an unprecedented low, that I was protected from experiencing full-on, the first time round. Not that the show – which follows three jobless youths who want to make some money through a trajectory of comically thwarted would-be criminal pranks through to a terrible self-implosion involving racism and con-trick recruitment into an Ulster-headed regiment – remotely comes across as cultural tourism or an exercise in gawping anthropology.

The company is Tooting Arts Club who seem to have created an excitingly honourable niche for itself. They cater primarily in site-sensitive work on their own very South London turf and then in finding an expressive location in central London to give the work a further lease of life. They pioneered this modus operandi with Buckhurst's incomparable version of Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. In Tooting, a real-life traditional pie shop became the setting for a terrifyingly crammed and atmospheric account of this masterpiece. It had performers jumping onto the dining tables and letting you feel the deprave breeze created by the killer's razor. The shop was then recreated in Shaftesbury Avenue for a sell-out West End run.

open image in gallery

The Club has gone one better this time, having commandeered for its in-town gig the abandoned many-storied building that used to be home to Central St Martins Art School before it moved to King's Cross. The birthplace of the Sex Pistols' music, the venue can still be made to feel spoiling for Anarchy in the UK. Keeffe's unflaggingly brilliant dialogue flies with the vernacular as a vehicle for a linguistic spree. We hear the cocky but comically cocked-up expressiveness of this mishap-prone trio who, in the middle play, Abide With Me, are on a hormonal high because they think that an uncle has secured them tickets for the Manchester United versus Southampton FA cup final. It's typical of the trilogy's lovely streak of tragicomic bathos that Uncle Harold farcically lets them down, reducing them to listening to the match on a tranny outside Wembley's corrugated iron perimeter.

The three actors are ideal casting and wholly believable but Thomas Coombes is absolutely transfixing, with his dangerously close-together eyes and sensuous toothy mouth as the combustible skinhead Paul who would kick a slight breeze if it got in his way. His descent into racist violence in the almost unbearable murk of the last play chills the blood. He hates, he says, “Spades who act like they aren't spades and spades who're cocky cause they are spades”. Coralling the audience as it moves up to three performance spaces, this is an unforgettable show that sensitises you to the comparable waste of young people's potential today.

To November 7; 020 7478 0100