BLOOM WITH A VIEW
Film star Orlando bares (nearly) all as a horrid hitman
Killer Joe (Trafalgar Studio, London) Verdict: On target ★★★★✩ My Name Is Lucy Barton (Bridge Theatre, London) Verdict: See it for Linney ★★★✩✩
ORLANDO BLOOm has chosen a pretty unpleasant play, Killer Joe, for his three-month summer sojourn in the West End. Yet the performances are strong, with Pirates Of The Caribbean star Bloom to the fore as a Texas cop-turned-hitman who has a creepy attitude towards women.
Although some scenes are not easy to watch, the production packs a generally believable punch. It also contains a superb turn from Sophie Cookson as a 20-year-old virgin who becomes the object of the hitman’s lust.
We are in Nineties U.S. trailer-parks-ville, where the Smith family lives in a filthy mobile home. The feckless Smith father (Steffan Rhodri) agrees to a plot by his drug-runner son Chris (Adam Gillen) to pay Joe to bump off Chris’s mother. They hope to cash in on her life-insurance policy.
Killer Joe demands a deposit. When the Smith men are unable to pay it, he seizes an alternative: innocent, agile Dottie Smith (miss Cookson).
The stage is almost filled with a cut-away trailer home. Dottie, when she needs some peace, clambers on to its roof, even in thunderstorms.
Her nonchalance when she learns of the plan to kill her mother may signify a surreal edge — or it may just show how little she expects from life. Yet she does have her virtue, and this makes it horrible to watch a scene when Joe forces her to undress. The audience becomes almost complicit in the violation.
In one passage, playwright Tracy Letts (no relation) seems to compare trailer-park types to farm-bred rabbits.
But mr Bloom and miss Cookson are a memorably comely combination. And for those who are keen on such things, mr Bloom bares all (but only a rear view).
mAKING her UK stage debut, actress Laura Linney strolls on to the Bridge Theatre’s stage with disarming nonchalance and for the next 90 minutes fills this cavern of a place with the tale of a New York writer and her nine-week stay in hospital. Though I found My Name Is
Lucy Barton self-absorbed, it is impossible not to salute miss Linney’s skill.
She completes the evening alone with only minimal lighting changes and a few different backwall images — a view of manhattan’s Chrysler Building, as seen from the hospital room; a field in Illinois where Lucy, her middle-aged, middle- class character was reared.
Based on the best- selling novel by Elizabeth Strout, this is not a medical story. We are given few details of Lucy’s illness. Nor is it a story entirely of self- pity, though there is a theme of that as Lucy details her unhappy childhood.
It is a story of self-assertion, as an individual and as a writer. mother- of-two Lucy boasts that as a writer it is necessary to be ‘ruthless’ and if that means cutting yourself off from kith and kin, so be it. Lucy begins by recalling that the nurses were uncaring and her husband hated hospitals, so hardly ever visited.
But her mother did. The old lady had to go on an aeroplane for the first time, and re- establish contact with a daughter from whom she had almost completely drifted. The first word she uttered after all this time was Lucy’s childhood nickname.
much of the production is devoted to exchanges between Lucy and her mother. miss Linney alters her voice — a touch more scratchy — to convey her mum. They reach an accommodation of sorts, but you can file their relationship under D for dysfunctional.
Or D for dreary? Boy, I ached for other characters. But miss Linney is plainly a class act.
VERSIONS of these reviews appeared in earlier editions.