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What with the stained seats and strange people, a suburban late-night bus couldn’t really be described as the most pleasant place to be. But in ‘Circles’ it’s a refuge for 15-year-old Demi, who rides on its top deck night after night.
Birmingham’s notoriously lengthy number 11 bus route takes Demi away from and then right back to her front door each evening. It is a sad metaphor for the lives of the three generations of women in this sharp and ambitious but ultimately flawed new work from rising star writer Rachel De-lahay. Each woman is dominated and abused by men we never see, and each one fails to break the cycle.
While Angela turns up at her sour and broken mother Phyllis’s house in an attempt to finally leave her violent partner, Angela’s daughter Demi is hitting it off with the attitude-heavy Malachi on the top deck. When he says he’ll never hurt her, we are seduced into thinking that perhaps Demi might manage to avoid the mistakes of her mother and grandmother.
Tessa Walker’s nicely pitched production alternates between Phyllis’s front room and the bus with just the use of some graffitied Perspex chairs. There’s some uplifting and funny banter that frames Demi and Malachi’s tentatively trusting relationship and Toyin Kinch’s turn as Malachi is very real. The stereotypes in his speech are a little grating (he’s all ‘blud’ and ‘bredrin’), but in the main, De-lahay’s dialogue is convincing.
What De-lahay doesn’t set us up for is the climax. There are two other worlds circling the ones in the play: one is Demi and Angela’s broken home, the other is the people Demi mixes with outside the bus. Both worlds are mentioned and neither seen. But when Demi betrays Malachi because of pressure from a boy we have barely heard about, it suddenly jars. Not showing us the oppression she is under means that although the ending has drama, it feels dropped out of the blue.
‘Circles’ says some important things about women who have had the self-esteem beaten out of them, but ultimately, when it comes to delivering the full impact of their tragedy, it doesn’t go to the last stop.