Theatre

Horizon Arts’ wretchedly-named smack parable ‘Heroin(e) For Breakfast’ amassed a fair degree of good notices this Fringe, including winning the Holden Street Theatre Award. Unfortunately I can could only really muster mild irritation at a play that flails between worthy grit and retina-searing hyper-realism without landing anywhere particularly compelling.

The setting is the living room of thuggish dreamer Tommy, in which he engages in frantic sex with new girlfriend Edie, bickers with housemate Chloe, and pops out of to buy 'bacon, eggs, orange juice, and heroin'. Before long, heroin – or perhaps that should be Heroine - turns up in anthropomorphised form. A manipulative, Obama-quoting Marilyn Monroe imitator, she spends the rest of the production wrecking the remnants of the three’s lives. Unfortunately after some nice initial flourishes she settles into an increasingly daft deus ex machina role, a dance routine or speech from her abruptly forcing the action forward in a way that circumvents any need to show the characters struggling with the drug in any way.

Were it all a sort of blackly comic cartoon the production might carry it off. Unfortunately it keeps asking you to care about the characters. This is a problem, as they’re all wildly unlikeable. In fact, ‘Heroin(e)...’ even has a sort of answer to this: Tommy repeatedly breaks the fourth wall to hector us for being too middle class to really appreciate what we’re seeing. Funnily enough, I got a similar feeling about Horizon. 

'Heroin(e) For Breakfast' played at the Underbelly, Cowgate, Edinburgh.