The title gives it all away in Gareth Ellis’s contemporary play ‘A View Of Concrete’.
This is a very bleak, gritty drama. Needless to say there’s just not one thing pretty about it. It’s not what everyone will look at, but once you do, you can’t take your eyes away from the action.

The action of ‘A View Of Concrete’ involves the lives of four dysfunctional young people who each live in their own contrived universes, which bear little relationship with reality. For these ghetto dwellers, the natural world is but ‘a nostalgic dream’.

Andrew Bibby plays James who is addicted to watching television and is obsessed with monitoring the bizarre behaviour of his next door neighbour.

Alexandria Steffensen in an electric, emotionally exhausting performance plays Jacqui whose life is a mix of psychotic drug taking and attempting to have her bizarre sexual fantasies met.

Katie Fitchett who always gives a strong performance plays Billy who lives in a dark fantasy world where she dreams of becoming smaller and smaller until she can disappear with the fairies into the Jacaranda tree in the backyard.

Damian Walshe-Howling of ‘Underbelly’ fame gives an effectively edgy performance as Neil a tough drug man with a literary bent.

I go along with the plays director, Laura Scrivano, who described the ‘A View of Concrete’ as ‘like watching a train wreck, fascinating yet horrifying’. There was a chilling scene played out between Jacquie and James that still haunts me.

A B Sharp production in association with MPOWER Youth Productions, ‘A View Of Concrete’ plays downstairs at Belvoir Street till the 23rd November.