CRAZYHORSE - Bristol New Vic

Crazyhorse is a play in two halves, albeit that they blend gradually together without the enforced separation of an interval. The first half, whilst firmly laying the foundations for later, is a garage sink drama, revolving around the petty crimes and petty lives of a multi-racial trio of young men - a scene from The Bill scripted by Edward Bond. The second half, with its consideration of grief, loss and the return of a deceased spouse, combines a Nineties Blithe Spirit with an urban Wuthering Heights. Madhav Sharma as Mr Jutla delivers a sweeping blast of whisky-soaked emotion and bombast, and the play moves rapidly from the snappy street dialogue of the first half to rolling soliloquy and a supernatural fantasy.

Inside this curate's egg are several good plays trying to hatch out. Writer Parv Bancil has the ability to write witty, gritty material about multi-ethnic working class youth culture. At the same time, the inventiveness and depth of his exploration of coping with loss suggests scope for sensitive, powerful drama. The seam-welding of the two in Crazyhorse produces a whole which is less than the constituent parts. The rich material on the nature of male friendship and the rules of the criminal demi-monde in the first portion is delivered too sparsely to constitute a worthwhile thread of its own, yet is too excessive to act simply as the medium for setting up the plot mechanics and paranormal metaphysics for the second half. One also has to wonder whether the inexplicable rapid emotional gear-changes which litter the script, with characters running through calm-anger-pleading-anger in the space of four lines, could not have been ironed out in rehearsal. This is, after all, one of the advantages of a world premiere: the playwright is on hand to polish the bits that don't work. It is hard to say whether the fault for this lies with writer, director or actors: but there are definitely a few burrs which need smoothing down.

Bancil is an Anglo-Asian writer who, with Crazyhorse, has slipped the leash of 'ethnic writing' to produce a play which reflects more closely the experience of second and third generations of Asian Britons. This is a piece which places a varied ethnic cast in a situation where ethnicity is disregarded; a colour-blind theatre where race is the background rather than the whole picture, treating ethnic minorities as fully-rounded characters rather than ciphers struggling against either the culture of their domicile or that of their roots. As such, it represents an exciting move forward towards a new and unifying theatre for a melting-pot Britain. And Bancil has the potential to contribute some great work to this new theatre, even though Crazyhorse only hints at this potential, rather than exploiting it to the full.

TOBY O'CONNOR MORSE