Camden People’s Theatre; 28th October 2013
Arriving in London aged 19, I moved into student halls of residence on Camden Road, just up from Camden Town station. This was a temporary home, a bed and base as I navigated my first term at the Bartlett, UCL. Life was constant sketching, keen observation, with the eager freshness of arriving in a new place to study. For me, Camden exists from this point onwards; there is no childhood Camden, no ‘how things were’.
Watching The Worst of Scottee I found myself drawn into a very different borough; painted in tears, ink, milk, chocolate, mascara and £1.50 beer we see a difficult childhood on a Kentish Town estate, a messy adolescent place, awkward teenage nights in the West End.
Alternating between a photo-booth cabaret karaoke and a performative confessional, The Worst of Scottee develops into an unsettling montage, vivid incidents at times prompting a nervous laugh from the audience, at times suffocatingly intense. We are swung from disapproval, through disbelief into empathy and back again, following a young Scottee as he paces between the chip shops near his house, the police station, an Easy Internet cafe and the National Portrait Gallery, finding and losing friends, senses of home, and passions.
I missed the show at Edinburgh this year but am glad I caught it here. It felt at home at Camden People’s Theatre. A raw, visceral piece of storytelling
– Bethany Wells
See The Worst of Scottee at the Roundhouse, Camden, 3 – 15 Feb
