Thief by Liam Rudden. The Stage Door Theatre, Drury Lane, London to 25 May 2024.

4✩✩✩✩ Review: William Russell.

“Shocking and splendidly performed.”

Liam Rudden’s Jean Genet inspired play about Sailor, an Edinburgh male prostitute, which won the Best Theatrical Performance Award at the 2014 Brighton Fringe and went on to be performed on Broadway and Edinburgh over the years has come to this enterprising new fringe theatre for four performances to celebrate its tenth anniversary. It takes us to places we really don’t want to go and meet people better not met. It also contains a no holds barred, and quite a few bared, performance by Lee Fanning who confronts the audience at the start and never loses his grip. A trigger warning might be a good idea although an adult audience should be able to take it all in its stride as Sailor, prostitute, thug, avaricious, a convict, self abuser, thief, transvestite when the job requires it, and killer tells his story. Genet’s influence is clear but Rudden, who was Entertainments Editor at the Edinburgh Evening News, also draws on interviews he conducted for the play’s shocking heart – a Hamburg pimp, into whose clutches Sailor and his lover Blue, have fallen, controls his goods for sale by playing games of Russian roulette. Fanning, who created the role, is astonishing – he is fit, handsome enough to be appealing to his abusers, but clearly dangerous to have anything to do with with and has the audience in both hands toying with it right from the start. The play, which opens with masturbation and nudity, does take the breath away as Sailor does whatever he has to do to survive. People do have lives like this and nobody should have. The end is bleak, shocking and inevitable.

Cast

Lee Faning – Sailor.

Creatives

Director – Liam Rudden.

Lighting Design – Richard Lambert.

Sound Design – Eric Grieve.