Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Low Down
Two Edinburgh bookies feel the pressure of signing customers up for online betting accounts, signing their own jobs away in the process. But everything is about to change.
Review
The aching, angry heart of The Bookies beats loudest during a quiet but devastating exchange that arrives about halfway through the play. One of the titular characters, Pat, tells his co-worker John about a former customer, a woman who’d come into the Edinburgh shop where he was working because she needed the bathroom but was told by the manager she needed to spend some money before he’d give her the key to the toilet.
From the script:
“But she wis bitten. Couldnae ootrun the monster. She became a permanent fixture fae that day. Until, that is, her pension went. Then her hoose. Her car. Her husband ae fifty fuckin year decides he’s hud enough and divorces her.”
Pat then goes on to say that she had “the helpless face,” the doomed visage from which there’s no return, an expression he’s now seen on Harry, the compulsive gambler who can’t stop feeding money into the machine in front of him.
From that point on the audience rightfully suspects that Harry, a former alpinist who once scaled Mount Everest, will likely not be alive at the end of this play. To the great credit of writers Mikey Burnett and Joe McCann, Harry’s fate and what follows is largely unexpected, a twisty and often funny tale with an ending that would make Martin McDonagh grin.
The Bookies has high ambitions, but like the gamblers it depicts, some of its hopes are never fully realized. The fantastical mental escapes that Harry experiences as he remembers his mountaineering days are at uncomfortable odds with the play’s working-class realism. Some focused restructuring could also likely be beneficial; the effects of the racism that John reveals has long made him uneasy would hit harder and feel less tacked on if the audience had experienced them with John earlier instead of only hearing about them near the show’s end.
While director Eleanor Felton hasn’t totally figured out how to make the transitions seamless in Summerhall’s Cairns Lecture Theatre, she does keep things moving and has gotten strong performances out of the talented cast of four. Fraser Wood gives a brave turn as sad sack Harry; Dayton Mungai plays John with quiet reservation, aptly holding his cards tight to his chest until it’s no longer possible to do so; and Francesca Hess breaks up all the testosterone with a welcome feistiness as area manager Michelle, a woman with troubling secrets of her own. Last but certainly not least, Ruaraidh Murray is the standout as rough-and-tough Pat; he gives The Bookies a strong foundation with his unwavering, gritty and witty performance.
