Tarantino meets Greek tragedy in a bloody but lyrical revenge drama
Royal Court, London SW1 ★★★★★
Friday night at the Royal Court, and the stalls look – shock! – about a third empty. It’s staging a provocative award-winning Black comedy from the States – a key part of its autumn season – and where, at the very least, are the faithful?
The powers that be at London’s sputtering new-writing hotspot must be praying that Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is (2018) catches fire at the box office. It’s certainly got the credentials to be a major talking point. Has there been as much simulated violence on stage here since Sarah Kane’s Blasted in 1995?
The agents of destruction are two young women – twins in fact, Racine and Anaia – engaged on a mission, from North to the South, thence to the Californian desert, to avenge the attack almost 20 years earlier that turned their mother into a human fire-ball. Her dying gasps to her girls – scarred too, though less heinously – command Old Testament retribution. Thinking of her as God – their “creator” – who are they to refuse her?
The only snag is the culprit was their no-good dad, whom she wants “Dead, real dead”. Cecilia Noble gives a riveting masterclass in upright dignity, her bed fixed at a vertical, as she rasps her last requests.
The mood is mock-hollywood by way of the House of Atreus, Tarantino meets Greek Tragedy; a loose lyricism helping the conversational flow. The pair – played in Ola Ince’s smartly executed production by a coolly offhand Tamara Lawrance and Adelayo Adedayo – drip nonchalance as they plot their course towards that act of intrafamilial horror. A stone in a sock is the main method of dispatch, felling a garrulous, self-disgusted lawyer, the unnamed patriarch’s new wife and one of his twin sons. The other one, a wannabe poet, lurches into view with a knife in his back.
The battering is done with a video game rapidity and cartoonish sound-effects. The twins are like ciphers, not giving much thought to the morality or consequences of their actions, but doing what each situation needs – twerking like the call-girls their half-brothers first take them for.
That withholding of sustained “argument” might seem novel; it also feels as if Harris has written a draft for a TV series, where it would work better.
Some effort is put into asserting the “theatricality” of the occasion – the characters talk about themselves in the third person, and the heroines themselves act like stage-hands, moving scenery as required.
Is there a “debate” to be had about
The girls’ mother tells them she wants their no-good dad ‘Dead, real dead’
what the play is saying? The father’s matter of fact self-justification is that he wasn’t respected as a young man – which might be a summation of callousness, a critique on Africanamerican masculinity, a comment on wider (white) society, a pointer to existential meaninglessness, or a joke at the expense of our patience.
Maybe it’s up to us to read what we want into the action. I certainly kept watching, but couldn’t help wondering – given how many huge issues are now in play in the realworld – if the whole affair isn’t a case of fiddling while Rome burns.