Deeply satisfying drama about fathers and sons – and video games
Monologues, like Chelsea boots and English madeleines, are out of fashion. And that’s a shame – they are a particularly poetic and intellectually cohesive way of exploring a play’s themes, and Gary Owen, Wales’s most important contemporary playwright, uses them to devastating effect. His 2015 work,
Iphigenia in Splott, was a masterpiece, showing a deprived young woman’s trajectory from street skank to martyr of the NHS. Here was a stylised yet highly realistic journey into the mind of someone on society’s margins.
Indeed, Owen’s greatest gift is to give a voice to the dispossessed, and he does so here in a blistering, deeply satisfying new work, Killology, produced by the Royal Court in association with Sherman Cymru. Davey (Sion Daniel Young) is a teenage boy, simultaneously neglected and indulged by an often errant father, who relates his wretched life at the hands of a gang of local thugs who are inspired to mete out a severe punishment inspired by a computer game they’ve played.
But Davey’s story runs alongside two others. There’s his dad, Alan (Seán Gleeson) who vows to take revenge for his son’s terrible suffering on the man who created the game. And there’s Paul (Richard Mylan), a swaggering mixture of evangelical zeal and cynicism who has created Killology as a horrid video nasty, but is intent on promoting it as a deeply moral experience because players are never allowed to forget the consequences of their actions.
Each man relates his own tale with urgency, and Owen has a knack of relating an action-packed story within a seemingly rambling meditation. “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus,” says Paul, but Owen’s finely crafted text never makes you yearn for a big reveal – he’s brilliant on the incidentals. Like Paul’s game, Owen manipulates the reality of what we see. Sometimes Davey is dead and Alan is a grieving father. In an alternative world, Davey has picked himself up and found a sense of purpose as a hospital porter.
The three performances are terrific and each very different. The shinysuited Mylan gives just an edge of vulnerability to the brash and callous Paul, while Gleeson conveys a strong skein of bubbling anger as the father desperate to reverse his neglectful past. However, the night belongs to the extraordinary, gazelle-like Young, who displays, very movingly, a yearning to escape from poverty and the sort of weary humour that comes from someone who has seen too much too young. If there is a flaw, it is in the unimaginative set design, which consists mainly of wires which dangle perilously from the ceiling and coil-like serpents across papier-mâché ridges. It’s as if the designer is struggling to make manifest a metaphor about the damaging psychological effects of technology. It feels cheap.
Many ideas spring from Killology but, essentially, it has an overriding personal theme and an overriding political one. It is about fathers and sons, how masculinity distorts emotional truth, and asks whether duty towards one another can give you any sort of fulfillment. The play’s message about the harmful effect of violent video games may seem hackneyed, but it has a contemporary piquancy. As geeky billionaire man-children refuse to take responsibility for the hatred and abuse cultivated on their digital platforms, Paul’s casual disregard for the damage caused by his computer-generated creation feels horribly relevant.
Until June 24. Tickets: 020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com