Spotlight: Been So Long

Che Walker's 1998 comedy depicts the final days of operation for a sleazy bar in London and the losers who love it. While the young cast members who take it on seem visibly less scarred by life's battles than their characters, they take a decent run at the material and wrest a lot of entertainment from its twists and turns. The action begins when Gil (George McConnell) bursts into the drinkery (the bar in Bedlam's new digs serves as the set) and, in a fit of mania, announces his fervent wish to murder a man named Raymond who stole his girl a couple of years before. Laconic barman Barney (Jeffrey Willis) is unstirred until he finds himself on the receiving end of a broken beer bottle, although with the arrival of Yvonne (Eleanor Caudill), Gil is subsequently defused (she waves a carpet cutter in his face) and sent off with his tail between his legs. Eventually, Raymond (William Daddario) shows up, a manic narcissist just out of prison whom troubled single mother Simone (Sasha Walloch) promptly falls for. It turns out she has a thing for troubled men, natch. By this point the central mystery is why the cast doesn't opt to perform this thing with straight-up British accents; it takes place in London, after all, and "mate" and "innit" don't hit the right marks when spoken in indeterminate English. That aside, everyone seems to be having a good deal of fun (Daddario gets some of the best lines of the night as the fabulously self-loving Raymond, at one point declaring, "I'm a hurricane. I'm a tidal wave," and doing it with conviction), and everyone handles Walker's obvious love of hard-bitten monologues without lapsing into unwelcome seriousness. Walloch manages to convince as a woman who won't allow herself to be burned by yet another cad—or maybe she will, she's not sure. Raymond escapes Gil's wrath in the end, then bursts off into the night in pursuit of Simone. A suggestion follows that they deserve one another, a conclusion with which it's hard to disagree.