Wrong Place

Mark Norfolk
Soho Theatre
(2003)

Trevor is a petty criminal who has been caught for the umpteenth time. The difference now is that he did not commit the offence for which he is about to go to prison.

The massive drugs stash that he has been caught with the belonged to his Uncle Monty, a remarkably spry man, supposedly in his seventies.

Wrong Place looks at the motivations of Trevor and his alternative fathers. Roddy, who brought him up, believes in right and is obsessed by trains, while Monty (Geoffrey Burton) is a wide-boy and Trevor's real father, as a result of an affair with his best friend Roddy's wife.

The conclusion that Mark Norfolk's not very convincing plot leads to is that nature is everything and will completely override a decent upbringing.

Too often, when Trevor is faced with choices, he selects the illogical one. It seems highly unlikely that a petty gangster would accept a lengthy prison sentence for someone else, even his disreputable father. Similarly, while Roddy is very irritating, he clearly means well and Trevor's behaviour towards him is frequently most uncharacteristic.

While Mark Theodore is convincing as Trevor under Abigail Morris's direction, Larrington Walker's Roddy is physically stiff and jerky which does not fit with his frenetic speech.

While it is good and still too rare to see a new writer with a West Indian background appearing on a London stage, regrettably Wrong Place is far from the perfect article.

Reviewer: Philip Fisher

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