By Michael Holland

Plays about crime sometimes have the undesired effect of attracting undesirables, and so it was at the Blue Elephant Theatre last week where staff were chasing up an audience member who hadn't paid, and who then calmly began to roll a cigarette in the auditorium! Smoking in a public place! You only see that in films nowadays. Fortunately it turned out to be a complete misunderstanding so there was no 'real' drama to precede the dramatised version of life we were all here to see.

And to enjoy Thick As Thieves you really do have to separate fiction from reality; the subject matter of burglary was often difficult to digest, so it has to be dressed up in comedy. Early jokes went unlaughed at until the audience came to terms with the fact that this was funny even though it was about those who make people's lives a misery.

Mark Whiteley wrote and stars in this two-hander with Daniel Hoffman. He told me that he had dabbled with a bit of skullduggery as a teenager but was more drawn to drama school than thieving, hence escaping with a few hours community service at the peak of his crime wave. Thick As Thieves is an amalgamation of all the stories he heard while growing up in his area of Nottingham, with "the names changed to protect the innocent," he tells me. To protect the guilty would be closer to the truth.
To see the casual invasion of our privacy, of our home and of our secrets on stage often hit the wrong buttons for a comedy, it was too real. Too painful. We see the utter indifference to the victims, hear the futile reasons burglars give for their actions, vainly trying to justify their deeds; kidding only themselves. We also see that deep down there is the sadness they feel at the knowledge that they are losers.

Thick As Thieves is loud, vibrant and hectic, and with the excellent lighting and sound effects I felt my adrenalin rising with the tension coming off the stage. It is part slapstick, part farce, part melodrama and revolves around the two burglars' discovery of a dead budgie and its equally dead owner in a flat. The play leads us down the spiral of events that follow; events that force them to choose just how low they can allow their morals to go, before it arrives at a shocking denouement.
On the way there are some funny moments, my favourite being the novel ideas Barry has to resuscitate the hypothermic budgie.

There was a brief period in the middle where the story went nowhere and became a succession of anecdotes gleaned from the criminal fraternity Whiteley grew up in, but the narrative soon got back on track.

For a play that began its life being performed in living rooms across the land before metamorphosing into a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe, Thick As Thieves has come a long way.

Blue Elephant Theatre until February 28th ~ 8 pm