It is not often that a play manages to resemble a Tarantino film and a Greek tragedy at once. And it is not often, these days, that theatre manages to shock. But Aleshea Harris’s brazen drama arrives from the US lavishing in its sense of overkill – “kill” being the operative term – and it will leave few unmoved, one way or the other.
Directed by Ola Ince (whose recent violent production of Romeo and Juliet came with a trigger warning) it has a high body count and a set, designed by Chloe Lamford, that comes alight with large, lapping flames.
A wife, known as She (Cecilia Noble), was left for dead by her husband, Man (Mark Monero), after he set fire to her 18 years ago. She now summons her twin daughters and asks for a pledge of vengeance: “Make your dad dead … Make him real dead … all the way dead.”
So begins the bloodletting as Racine (Tamara Lawrance) and Anaia (Adelayo Adedayo) follow the word of the woman they call “God” and embark on a stake-out of their father. Noble makes a formidable aggrieved matriarch, as monstrous as Medusa and with excellent flecks of comedy, while Lawrance and Adedayo riff well as the twins whose dead-eyed violence – and deadpan comedy – alternately conjure Uma Thurman’s avenging fury from Kill Bill and the amicable hitmen from Pulp Fiction.
Their journey becomes its own postmodern western, heavily stylised and knowingly using film techniques (chapter headings, slow motion scenes) alongside a self-conscious theatricality (characters narrate their own stories and manipulate the set to show its mechanics).
It misses no opportunities to either send up familiar tropes or, gratingly, remind us of its cleverness. Not all of the violent or comic scenes work, either. But these irritations are offset by its always crisp, entertaining and outrageous script.
The violence may seem gratuitous to some but it is also a function of the play’s Old Testament morality – to fight fire with fire – the only difference here being that it is two young black women meting out the justice. And while it is graphic, it is never cartoonish, with ancient echoes of Euripidean vengeance enacted on and by the family. As one twin says: “We came from a man who wants to kill our mama and a mama who want us to kill that man.”
Two black American families make up its cast: one poor, with an absent, ailing mother and a series of loveless foster parents, the other middle-class and feckless but with another long-suffering parent (Vivienne Acheampong, who plays a soccer mom with excellent comic angst).
And for all its archness and absurdism, two chilling scenes take us to the very serious cruelty at its heart. The first comes as She gives a blow-by-blow account of her suffering at the hands of Man, narrated as she lies covered in burns (“Body like an alligator because of what he did”). It is the greatest moment of violence in the play, more terrible for remaining off stage. The second is when the twins finally come face to face with their father and find Man to be unrepentant, the same man of 18 years ago who set their mother alight. “I was young,” he says, shrugging off guilt, and robbing his daughters – and the play – of any catharsis. So male violence is met by female revenge and this slick, postmodern play reveals itself to be ancient in its tragedy.
At the Royal Court theatre, London, until 23 October
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