The writer of the edgy TV drama The Responder, Tony Schumacher, is back with an equally edgy but surprisingly warm-hearted story of people down on their luck in Liverpool. On paper, The Cage sounds like another run-through of the clichés of casino dramas, but it regularly confounds expectations.
The setup is simple: two casino employees are, separately, skimming the takings, one to save her family from potential homelessness, the other to pay off loan-shark debts. Then it gets complicated. Their paths inevitably are on a collision course, both with each other and with the police and the violent drug-dealing son of the casino owner, who is using the place for his money-laundering. It’s an interesting premise, but what makes it really soar is the script, and the cast delivering it.
In the sob-story role of the widowed cashier in “the cage” is Sheridan Smith, a dab hand at playing women in extremis. But here she is a complex blend of she-wolf protecting her two children and dementia-stricken Nanna (Eileen O’Brien), and a pussycat who’s attracted to her boss’s hunky gangster son, Gary (Barry Sloane, pictured below), a former boyfriend. Similarly, her fellow-skimmer, casino manager Matty (Michael Socha), is both a classic loser with addiction problems and a kindly lost boy still in the grip of a childhood trauma. The metaphorical reach of the cage-image is regularly suggested as Leanne sits behind the bars of her cashier-desk, but not hamfistedly. Things could easily be overegged but somehow aren’t.
Keeping the drama on track is its tone, which partly comes from the characters’ pithy exchanges — Matty’s hostile daughter, on redundantly being asked how she is while visibly unhappy, points out tersely, “I’m listening to Joy Division!” — and the music itself, which is partly a jaunty medley of 1980s hits, Matt’s favourite era. It’s the soundtrack of these people’s teens, when good things presumably were still on their horizons.
Schumacher also throws in some interesting secondary characters, such as Gary’s mother Nancy, owner of the casino, presented by Geraldine James (pictured below right) as a soignée, poised woman with a brisk manner for business matters and a gentler approach with her employees. The scene focused on Nancy after Gary has significantly disappointed her, possibly for the last time, is one with the anguish of a pietà but brilliantly expressed via her slow removal, one by one, of her bright-orange false nails. Striking, too, is the “bizzy” on Gary’s tail, Fen Ning (Sophie Mensah), an Anglo-Chinese cop driven by an implacable desire to take Gary down. {Watch out, too, for the loan shark Matty owes money to, a reminder of engaging Scouse dramas past: Louis Emerick, aka Mick Johnson from Brookside.)
Some characters are just brief snapshots, the most memorable one being Ian Puleston-Davies as Vincent, the drug kingpin who supplies Gary with his wares. A single close-up of his face, flickering with menace and unspoken anger, is worth screeds of dialogue. This shot is the finale to the terrific scene in which Gary visits him to discuss his failure to pay him on time, a model of grim tension and sustained dry humour, as Vincent’s goons sit, not in a luxury pad, but in the cramped living-room of a terraced house, crammed onto a sofa, where they sit intently watching an episode of Escape to the Country.
The details of the plot, deservedly, have to stay under wraps here, as its twists are part of the fun. It’s ingenious and yet not so intent on reaching its destination that it fails to stop for rewarding pitstops where the main characters can be given added depth and warmth
The downside of the piece is its sound recording, which sometimes veers into unintelligibility, especially in Gary’s soft-spoken asides. But it is buoyed up by the sparkiness of Smith and Socha, a winning team who make you both laugh and cry. Socha’s outsized, pleading eyes and rangey, wired physique contain a world of pain, but he makes sure Matty is also witty and sweet. Smith, too, keeps things miraculously natural, even as the script threatens to explode into melodrama.
- All five episodes of The Cage are available on iPlayer
- More TV reviews on theartsdesk
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