At the end of January, I attended a live recording of No Dogs, a touching new audio drama from Flintlock Theatre that follows a pair of best friends living in London - one an immigrant from Jamaica, the other Ireland - and their children over several decades. I went in not knowing what level of production value to expect, as it was strictly audio, but was pleasantly surprised by the level of blocking, props (drinks are poured on stage in a scene at the bar, for example) and largely off-book actors. It’s not hard to imagine No Dogs as a successful stage play, should they wish to take it in that direction, although I appreciate the enduring accessibility of an audio piece.
Flintlock Productions produced the drama alongside a series of short animations which are free to watch on their website (where No Dogs will soon join them) and all are based on interviews with Jamaican and Irish immigrants.
A sense of thoughtfulness permeated the whole work, which was clearly scripted, acted and directed by a team passionate about the material. The story opens with Winston (Andrew Francis) talking to the deceased Dermot (Billy Boyle), imagining a conversation with him from beyond the grave. We quickly gather that death is not the only thing that separated the two men; something terrible happened decades before to create an irreparable rift. The central tension of the piece comes from unravelling exactly what went wrong, and how exactly Dermott’s daughter Dervla and Winston’s son Gary are involved.
As the story spans many years, Dermott and Winston are played by multiple actors. The casting is excellent - it’s immediately plausible these men would’ve been best friends, and their older and younger iterations do well to create a cohesive energy across performances.
Young Dermott (a magnetically intense Branwell Donaghey) is outwardly boisterous and inwardly troubled, hard-drinking and unfaithful to his wife. Young Winston (a subtle and compelling Jerome Wise), by contrast, is calm and collected and hides his own pain behind lighthearted patter. There’s the implication that the white Dermott, despite being discriminated against for his Irishness, is afforded a leniency towards his behaviour that Winston would not be.
As the older Winston, Andrew Francis is a particular stand out, delicately conveying a range of emotions buried just under the surface of joviality. There’s a scene of him standing in front of his son’s bedroom door, pleading with him, that will break your heart.
The pace was also great, right up until the end. There’s a soapish quality to the plot, and having more time to explore the inner lives of the two main characters would have added further depth and dimension. We’re told that Dermott’s conflicted and painful Catholic upbringing is the cause of his misery, but we don’t have any scenes addressing that directly. We don’t see that much of Winston’s life outside of his friendship with Dermott. At an hour long, it feels as though they’ve used the time they had judiciously and well - but makes me wish they’d taken an additional half an hour to push the characters deeper, if not further.
On that note, the final scene was also frustratingly anti-climatic. I understood and accepted the conciliatory feeling the play wanted to close with, but the easy forgiveness seemed at the expense of one character’s more plausible emotional reaction to another’s serious betrayal, so it felt a little pat. Again, what another handful of minutes could do to improve things!
Overall however, Flintlock have created a warm and compelling piece of theatre with broad appeal. No Dogs engaged me, and it doubtlessly will others too. It will be live to listen to at https://www.flintlocktheatre.com/no-dogs later this month - you can sign up for a reminder email from there as well.