Dead On Her Feet – review

Mel Carney (Jos Vantyler) and Ensemble. Photograph: Simon Annand

“Hope, that’s what I’m promoting,” winks Jos Vantyler’s show-stopping Mel Carson, pedlar of dreams and questionable morals, as he throws open the doors to one of the notorious dance marathons that caught on in 1930s America.

No skills required, the competitions were simply an endurance test for down-at-heel American couples to win money by dancing until they were the last pair standing. In Barry Kyle’s production of Roy Hutchinson’s Dead On Her Feet at the Arcola this month, we follow three couples dancing for their lives in front of a braying audience.

Set in the dead-end former steel manufacturing town of Pulaski in the nadir of the Great Depression, the play is ostensibly about the crumpling of the American Dream. If, at times, the script sometimes labours the point a little, it is deftly handled by the cast, who are uniformly excellent.

Vantyler gives a tightly controlled performance, flipping from slick-talking promoter to hysterical puppeteer exploiting suffering for entertainment. Kelly Gibson’s “dead-eyed” Bonnie also holds the room, firing off sharp one-liners and many of the quick-witted script’s dark jokes. “I ain’t going to pretend I been dreaming of this place all my life,” she says, refusing to play up to the media circus.

Eschewing the evocative jazz soundtrack of the 1930s, the play’s invasive contemporary dance soundtrack provides an intense background to the relentless movement on stage and is curiously well-suited to the Arcola’s brutal staging, with exposed iron pillars and open brickwork.

The cast are an exhausting blur of dancing and sprinting in the second half, while Mel’s reluctant assistant McDade, played by Ben Whybrow, polices the contest in return for bed and three square meals. Whybrow’s brooding onlooker raises a central theme in the play, struggling with his moral objections to the contest, but becoming corrupted by his own need for food and shelter.

The play’s themes of unemployment and desperation find a neat parallel with the narrative of the current recession in our own media, and it is not difficult to join the dots between the competition and our own entertainment industry, a week after the X Factor spent two hours of our Sunday evening broadcasting unsuccessful applicants being sent home in tears.

Dead On Her Feet
Until 3 November 2012
Arcola Theatre, Dalston