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Greg Freeman's 'Beak Street' is a noir gangster drama about cats (actual cats) living in Soho. It's a set-up that may sound ominously redolent of a certain Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical; in fact, tonally speaking, it's closer to Art Spiegelman's seminal graphic novel series 'Maus' - a gritty underworld, smoke-strewn and heavily anthropomorphised.
The likeably hardnosed David Haydn is Beak Street Cat, the name derived from his particular patch of turf, which he loses after a rigged bet goes awry. He's counselled to let matters lie, the slipperiness of power being a fact of cat society. Instead he enters a vengeful moral descent.
Director/designer Ken McClymont keeps things simple: the cast boast a pleasingly detailed series of feline tics, but they look like humans: drinking, swearing and blowing each others' heads off. Freeman's script is a compelling, kitsch-free morality play that perhaps verges on out and out homage to film noir's golden age, but gains an oblique, occasionally comic frisson from, y'know, being about cats. On a bigger stage you'd have to ask harder questions, but here it works, a testament to Freeman's faith in his imagination and ours.
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