Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
A former British Prime Minister once said, “Children should be taught at school to learn how to make a profit”… all that you need to know about how our relationship with money has changed is summed up in that sentence. By uttering those craven words, David Cameron has placed down the 21st Century dogma, that the Economy is by far of greater importance than compassion, community, art, service and people.
It is arguably and depending on which side of the fence that mark your ideology and opinions, the reason why greed has become so venerated once again, the lessons of the 1980s have not being learned. The poor, the middle class, the unwanted, the conveniently disposable, the ones with vision for their communities, those that just want to give something to their fellow passengers on this Earth bound trip. It surely will not be long before we see a return to the more damaging of Victorian morals and attitudes invading society again. Turn a profit; despise those who see humanity as more than a commodity to exploit.
It is a situation, more than a point of issue, that grips Shon Dale-Jones, the relationship between money and humanity, our own stories dependent on the scourge of what can make a profit, what is being dictated to by absolutes, by the need of the benefit to the pocket rather than the community; it is a pocket that the legendary Robin Hood would have felt convinced was only right for picking.
Me & Robin Hood, a partnership in crime, a union of right in every young child’s mind grows strong; a session on stage in which the performer takes the audience through the reasoning of why a young boy from the Isle of Anglesey would go from the idea of gaining entry in the middle of the night to the local bank after his team won the junior football league and onto demonstrating outside of a bank many years later after learning that a member of theatre staff had been made redundant.
The power of conviction to see something put right, that somewhere between the end of the 60s and today we have changed our relationship with money and those that hold onto it as if it were the most precious thing in the world, that it has the right to be thought of as an living entity, that it can breathe, grumble and squawk like a petulant teenager. That it exists and has more rights and is cared for more than a person who finds themselves on the streets some where we have gone wrong, somewhere only Me & Robin Hood can put it right.
A superb show by Mr. Dale-Jones, a reality check for us all!
Ian D. Hall