Surreal and chilling response to our times
Theatre Pity Royal Court Downstairs
Anonchalant, unemployed young man kills time by observing passers-by in an ordinary town square. People chomp ice creams, walk their dogs. An older man, a professor of history, arrives and rants at his daughter that she shouldn’t be living here – there’s no coffee shop! He’s killed by lightning. The youth marries the professor’s daughter, they have sex, and the nearby department store where she works blows up.
If you think the first few minutes of Rory Mullarkey’s Pity are weird, then strap in because you ain’t seen nothing yet. Abraham Popoola’s hero goes on a mind-bending journey into hell.
Mullarkey first garnered attention in 2013 with Cannibals, inspired by the Ukrainian famine of the Thirties, and hailed as perhaps “one of the most provocative, original and disturbing debuts since Blasted”. In Blasted (1995), Sarah Kane squeezed a violent civil war into a Leeds hotel room. Mullarkey appears drawn to similarly perturbing scenarios of societal upheaval, albeit placing a distinctive accent on absurdist comedy.
Both his follow-ups, the Door, which envisaged a Middle England uprising against the Establishment, and the protracted (and panned) Saint George and the Dragon, an allegorical romp through English history to the Brexit-beset presentday, have drawn comparisons with Monty Python. Here that influence is writ large. Pity’s motto might be “And now for something completely different”, and you half-expect Graham Chapman’s Colonel to drop in and bring the action to a halt.
Without wishing to divulge too much, Chloe Lamford, the designer, has counted more than 20 explosions all told, and that’s not half the jolting bizarreries strewn across the piece. We behold the invasion of motorised tanks. There are protracted shooting sprees conducted with showy machismo and a ludicrous insistence on triumphant dance moves. A female Prime Minster arrives to take charge as the terrorism escalates, only to degenerate into jibberish mid press conference. A man arrives to offer help and is disembowelled, then eaten.
We are feasting on horrors, so flippantly served that we’re allowed to laugh but may feel sick while doing so. As the procession of discombobulating visuals continues, our humanity is pushed against the wall and asked to declare itself. We’re made conscious that we’re sitting comfortably in the Royal Court; the nine-strong cast, marshalled by director Sam Pritchard, brim over with conspiratorial goonishness. Chopin’s funeral march serves as a running gag, accompanying the knowingly amateur, very visible exits of the slain. It’s all a game – right? Yet isn’t a harrowing variant of this being played for real in far-off countries – could it not happen here?
In sum, Pity invites comparisons with Candide, Voltaire’ s complacency moc king satire on optimism in the face of relentless, biblical-scale misfortune. Mullarkey further seems to have pulled off the trick of reinventing the juvenile anarchy of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi for the 21st century.
A play fit, then, for the summer silly season and yet one that resonates in a chilling way with the madnesses of our strife-riven age.
Until Aug 11. Tickets: 020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com