Grieve seems to focus attention more on the straightforward detective story and, while this requires focus, it does not seem to be Graham’s focus. The opening scene goes a long way in the right direction, although the characters, all police, could afford to be more stereotypically, as well as adventurously, quirky and fussy. Graham’s writing, his focus on convention and protocol, should guide proceedings, and it does, at least to start.
![phantom brigade as signature phantom brigade as signature](https://cdn.gamer-network.net/2019/usgamer/Phantom-Brigade-Shot-04.jpg)
More Thin Blue Line and less Z Cars might have helped. The play strikes one as more comic, at least in the first Act, than it is played here. There is no organic progression to that point it seems presented as a way to shock the audience. Unfortunately, as directed by James Grieve, that climactic moment is as preposterous as it sounds. In understanding the hunted, have the hunters changed? Is becoming them, key to finding them? Suddenly, there is an orgy of red tape encompassing the officers and, after a tentative start, they are in an orgy of their own, man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, all together. The police officers (two men, two women) are scouring maps, looking for patterns, clues to the location of the Angry Brigade.Red tape joins various dots on the maps. It is never clear whether this is some sort of dream sequence or an intense representation of Psychogeography, focussed on human bodies rather than urban landscapes.
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There is a moment, however, towards the end of the first Act where there is a brief elision: where one world smashes into the other. It’s a sound approach in terms of form inventive, yet reflecting the content in a simple, tangible way. This makes complete sense as the first Act deals with the police investigation the second tells the same story from the point of view of the foursome who have been bombing London. The second is quite anarchic, free-flowing and surprising. The first is more formal in construction, a conventional unfolding of a detective story. Graham’s play is here presented in two Acts, both very different. This question comes into sharp focus towards the end of Act One of The Angry Brigade, James Graham’s 2014 play now having its debut London season at The Bush after premiering at Plymouth and touring the UK. Do these encounters fuel their investigative endeavours or somehow corrupt them? They encounter communes where men and women live and love together freely, unconcerned about the constraints of “ordinary” life, swapping partners, being fluid in their sexuality and caring for others and their children. The closer the unit gets to their quarry, the more understanding they have of the world from whence The Angry Brigade came.
![phantom brigade as signature phantom brigade as signature](https://rpgamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/phantom-brigade_2020-11-18_006.jpg)
This last sees them consider an office chair and the non-traditional ways it could be used.
#Phantom brigade as signature free#
Steeped in tradition, protocol and procedure, the small team of police officers work frantically and intimately, determined to locate and arrest their quarry.Īlong the way, they dabble with informants, an unreliable Press (at one point The Daily Mirror offers a reward for the capture of their quarry and blows their own cover) and concepts such as Association and Psychogeography (a way of seeing urban surroundings differently, free form rather than rigidity). Like all good extremists, the perpetrators, who call themselves The Angry Brigade, write mysterious, anonymous letters to the authorities.
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It’s 1970 and Scotland Yard decides to set up a small, secret unit of specialist officers in an attempt to track down the perpetrators of the bombings.