Reviews : Pretend You Have Big Buildings

What a great title for a play, PRETEND YOU HAVE BIG BUILDINGS, unveiled by the Manchester Royal Echange as the winner of its national playwriting competition, sounds incredibly apt...as it turns out, Ben Musgrave has set his touching, funny, immensely assured drama in Romford, Essex. His characters can see Canary Wharf twinkling away in the distance - a constant reminder that they're on the periphery of London, living lowrise lives. There's some scoffing talk of Romford's now-demolished Dolphin Centre, with its once admired pyramid roof, but the evening has remarkably little to do with architecture, urban regeneration or delusions of civic grandeur.

Schoolboy Leon likes dressing up in his mum's clothes and trying on her make-up, though he tells himself, 'There's no shame in this' he'll still do whatever it takes to keep in with his straight mates, even if that means hitting a friendly Anglo-Indian kid just arrived at school. Danny, whose widowed mother has brought him over from India to start a new life, takes this knee-jerk racism in his stride and soon toughens up. Before long, something more than ordinary friendship is flowering between the two boys.

Danny, whose widowed mother has brought him over from India to start a new life, takes this knee-jerk racism in his stride and soon toughens up. Before long, something more than ordinary friendship is flowering between the two boys.

While it's highly reminiscent of Jonathan Harvey's Beautiful Thing and Hanif Kureshi's My Beautiful Launderette, Musgrave's fresh take on forbidden desire in unforgiving surroundings races with a vitality all of its own. If the piece has a fault, it's that the racial abuse feels too lightly entered into and then skipped over, but the performances ring too true for that to matter much.

Rising star Jonathan Bailey, who memorably lit up the last major revival of Beautiful Thing in London, is on winsome form again as the girly shcoolboy Leon - firing every scene with coltish charm - and he's ably matched by Sacha Dhawan as the bright-eyed new kid. Together, directors Jo Combes and Sarah Frankcom, flying scenerey in and out to ensure no let-up in pace, turn a real find of a script into a top-flight night.
The Daily Telegraph

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WRITTEN by 26-year-old Ben Musgrave, the youngest writer ever to have a play produced on the Royal Exchange’s main stage, Pretend You Have Big Buildings won first prize in the Bruntwood Playwriting Competition, a national search for new young writing talent.

With Monster, the second prize winner, having just finished a sell-out run at the Exchange’s studio, it helps to prove that new writing is excitingly alive and well but that it needs support.

It may be unnecessary to compare Musgrave’s play with Duncan Macmillan’s Monster, but without second-guessing the judges, it’s easy enough to see that, in terms of staging, Musgrave’s bigger and more ambitious play had to be produced on the main stage rather than in the Studio.

It opens, for instance, with the recently-widowed Ruhksana (Shobna Gulati (pictured), ex-Coronation Street) and her teenage son Danny (Sacha Dhawan, from the film and original stage production of The History Boys), flying into Heathrow from the Indian sub-continent.

They’re bound for Romford, on the very edge of London, where they’re moving into a house left to Ruhksana by her late, Romford-born husband.

Family tensions

Greeting them, his sister Annie (Susan Twist) leaves us in no doubt that there had been family tensions over the inter-racial marriage. Meanwhile, Rob (Steve North), a soon-to-be-redundant middle-manager in the ailing car industry is having his own marital problems with his acquisitive wife Karen (Tanya Franks), not to mention a son Leon (Jonathan Bailey) with a penchant for dressing up in his mum’s makeup and frocks.

The way these characters, plus the volatile working class boy Steven (Billy Seymour), collide and interconnect provides the narrative drive for this thought-provoking piece about the nature of belonging to a place and the physical effects of regeneration on those who are left out.

The performances are all thoroughly committed, especially from the younger cast members, and it’s full of ideas, perhaps a little too much so, in fact.

The production, interestingly from two female directors, Sarah Frankcom and Jo Combes, is a significant piece of work and the Royal Exchange and Bruntwood deserve congratulations for bringing it to a wider audience.

Manchester Evening News