Ten Storey Love Song

39658 original

Middlesborough, massacred by Maggie Thatcher, is “a chain gang of chain stores” in Richard Milward’s second novel. Luke Barnes’ adaptation for Middle Child Theatre Company, backed by live techno, paints a bleak picture of post-industrialism as it follows the tangled relationships of one tower block’s residents.

There’s Jonny, an unemployed dealer who bangs like a buck. His girlfriend Ellen might as well be a sex doll. One floor up is Alan Blunt, a bitter, racist ex-copper, living alone and left behind, often found hanging around at school gates. One down, off his head on pills, there’s Bobby the Artist and his sweet-toothed sweetheart Georgie. Picked up by a hip London gallery, he’s exhibited—and exoticised—as an incarnation of northern destitution and depression.

On the page, these figures might have some space to think and breathe. They might seem like real people, sympathetic even. Onstage, however, they’re boiled down to stock – and grotty, patronising stock too. Fixating on sex, drugs and the northern soul, Millward wrings their lives for entertainment value. It’s a graphic novel of Broken Britain.

It’s certainly engaging. Barnes finds a pulsing poetry and a raucous, relentless staging mirrors a novel written in one unbroken paragraph. But make no mistake, this is poverty porn—worse, anime poverty porn—and since it warns against elitist exoticism, that’s criminal. Doubly so in the context of a cosmopolitan, pay-to-play festival. Millward’s happy endings—tender sex for Jonny, salads for Bobby—are the fictional equivalent of gentrification.