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South London theatre company Velvet Trumpet has built a remit in delivering bleak plays about marginalised people and places. So perhaps all you need to know ahead of seeing ‘Ugly Lovely’ is this: it’s set in Swansea.
Shell (played by writer Ffion Jones) is trapped. She’s 26, with a three-year-old she palms off to her mum as often as possible. Her boyfriend is unfaithful, and never seen once. She spends her evenings guzzling vodka and tottering around nightclubs with her bezzie, the unrepentant Tash (Sophie Hughes). Nursing hangovers, Shell wistfully soliloquises to her Nan’s ashes, wishing she could escape her provincial purgatory and seek out a new life in Liverpool.
From the accents to the details, this is a world Jones clearly knows and owns. The grimy tableau feels totally authentic: rough sex, doner kebabs, the odd attempted suicide and the endless, interminable noise of the sea. It’s all delivered in a tight production by Nikolai Ribnikov, in a Lizzy Leech’s nifty set: grubby floor tiles, walls stained by the cigarette smoke of yesteryear.
But it all struggles to hang itself on an unfocused story. And problematic, too, is the way that the lives of a poverty-stricken underclass are played for broad laughs at the expense of plausibility, none less so than when Tash mistakes Nan’s ashes for cocaine. (Seriously: who would fail to recognise a funeral urn? Or assume its contents to be several thousand quid’s worth of marching powder?) Perhaps these gags would feel more acceptable played out to an audience in Swansea itself, rather than affluent Islington.
Ultimately Jones hints at, rather than displays, a wonderfully savage kind of humanism in this play. It’s certainly refreshing to have an underprivileged world outside of council estates within the M25 under the magnifying glass. So let’s look out for whatever she does next.