England & Son

Holden St Theatre

Review by Kate Gaul

This production comes to Adelaide Fringe via the Holden St Edinburgh Fringe Award 2023. Written by Ed Edwards, author of the 2018 play “The Political History of Smack and Crack”, “England & Son” is a collaboration with performer Mark Thomas and draws on first-hand experiences of violence, drugs, and incarceration. It is bleak, darkly funny, and a chilling account of inter-generational male brutality and abuse. The work uses colonialism as a further lens by interpolating the violence of British soldiers in Malaya as legitimate state sanctioned atrocities which are then brought into the returning soldiers’ family homes.  The cycle continues. The class divide widens between the haves and have-nots and its wider political context, in the era of Maggie Thatcher, gives the play a grounded and powerful edge.  As a monologue about abuse, diminishing hopes and the betrayal of a generation, “England & Son” packs a punch.

Cressida Brown is the director and performer Mark Thomas chose to wisely work in an open space with the audience in the round. The performance is energetic, explosive, and fast paced. This isn’t a genre busting work and nor is the message particularly new.  The delight (if that’s a word that can be used to describe such a bleak world) is in watching Mark Thomas relish the performance and presence of an audience. Critically it does feel as if we are being performed “at” rather than invited into an intimate exchange between humans which can be one of the delights of the monologue. Fringe is full of solo performance, and this is another notch in the belt for those theatrical adventurers who are looking beyond comedy and music to sample the rich array of more serious theatre offerings in Adelaide this year.