Blooming handsome — but oh so very ugly
Trafalgar Studios
Can you be too pretty to play ugly? Granted, there are exceptions. As a ridiculously good looking young man, Billy Zane played the serial killer in the ocean-going thriller Dead Calm. But then there was a glassy surface to Zane’s fine features; something slightly psychopathic about the smile that doesn’t reach the eyes. Orlando Bloom, however, has the looks of a genuine matinee idol. And in this revival of Tracy Lett’s 1993 play — later made into the 2011 movie starring Matthew McCounaughey — Bloom is on terrific form as the unremittingly hardhearted Joe, a cop who hires himself out to anyone who wants someone dead and can pay $25,000.
Though he shares the moral low ground of his new employers, in social status he towers over them. For they — a feckless father called Ansel (Steffan Rhodri) and his drug dealing son Chris (Adam Gillen) — are white and working class (though unemployed) and live in a trailer.
Their first conversation in the play is the set-up for what follows. Chris has a money-making scheme. It involves the murder of his mother who is also his father’s ex-wife. Collecting the resulting life insurance will be a cinch after it goes to Chris’s young sister Dottie (well played by Kinsman star Sophie Cookson with an air of unhinged about her).
The crime is hatched with all the hesitation of planning a trip to the Norfolk Broads. Even Dottie shrugs her agreement. Her mother tried to smother her as a baby. “I think it’s a good idea,” she says breezily after overhearing the conversation.
Now, not to be judgmental about lifestyle choices, add that conversation to the fact that Ansel slobs around the caravan in his vest, and his second wife Sharla (Neve McIntosh) answers the door without any clothes on, would it really be too pejorative to describe the family as trash?
And given the type of home they live in, is it really so wrong to precede that word with trailer? Probably. The term to which I allude is now deemed too insulting to use. It is now seen as unfair to the no doubt many people who live in trailers yet keep a tidy home and don’t have members of their family murdered.
But such social awareness is hard to detect in Simon Evans’s production. This pitch black comedy is played for laughs. And as a thriller it’s as a tense as any two hours you will currently find at the theatre. Bloom in particular is brimful of cold-blooded menace.
And although much of the talk around this show is that he, too, gets his kit off (much to the delight of his girlfriend, Katy Perry, who accidentally posted her admiration for her boyfriend’s buttocks on social media), Bloom’s performance is totally convincing. It peaks inthe scene in which Joe’s interrogation skills as a cop reveal the truth behind the murder plot.
As a portrait of the disintegrated American family, Letts -— who went to win a Pulitzer for his family epic August: Osage County — doesn’t quite reach the heights, -or should that be depths, of a Sam Shepard play.
But thanks to the menacing Bloom, the evening grips with a rare and sustained sense of threat. And, oh boy, is this Joe ugly.