Beautiful Losers at The SiLo

By FRANCIS TILL

Mike Hudson's Beautiful Losers brings two of the most capricious literary rascals of all time to heady, comedic and occasionally wrenching life in this stimulating hour at the intimate SiLo.

Jack Kerouac (Ian Hughes) and Neal Cassady (Scott Wills) led tangled, explosive, inventive, liquor-thickened and amphetamine-fuelled lives of legendary dimensions, chronicled not only by the lightly fictionalised diaries that became Kerouac's passage to literary stature, but also by such figures as Jerry Garcia, Allen Ginsburg and Ken Kesey.

Because of that, most audiences will know a lot about both luminaries, which is a good thing since the biographical reach of this work provides us with a smorgasbord of snippets from 20 years in their short lives.

Expanding on a shorter version that presented to mixed reviews in October last year, Losers still glosses over many of the same things that version did, even while showing much improvement. It is difficult, for example, to imagine the characters on the stage as being capable of inspiring all that Kerouac and Cassady inspired: the electrifying charisma and alligator-brain sexuality that surrounded these men (especially Cassady) like catastrophic ozone layers is just not on display. We are told about it instead, when we should rather be treated to a more direct experience.

We are also not given much insight into the artistry of the men, despite a text that utilises the writings they produced.

Cassady, in particular, was a brilliant writer of letters and much of the Beat movement depended on them for direction, but we see little of this.

Instead, we see the writing (in which Kerouac does, convincingly, perpetually engage) as almost a peripheral aspect of the extremely condensed human story rather than the reverse, which is a take that can be difficult for dedicated fans of the literature rather than the lives.

Ultimately, the play could benefit either from being longer, with a larger cast, or more tightly focused in time. Still, the doomed beauty of these men, whose victories were constructed of so many losses, is on ample display and the direction from Margaret-Mary Hollins is deeply sympathetic.