Killer Joe
Playwright: Tracy Letts Director: Simon Evans Trafalgar Studios, 14 Whitehall, London SW1 (0844-871 7632). Until 18 August Running time: 2hrs 10mins (including interval)
Orlando Bloom has never had much asked of him on screen, said Ian Shuttleworth in the FT. He is famed for his roles in the Tolkien and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises, but in each he was little more than “cinematic eye candy”. Nor has he done much stage work either – just one appearance in London and one in New York – so it’s been hard to make a “reliable assessment of his chops as an actor”. But all the indications are that given the chance – as he has been by being handed the title role in this 1993 drama set among “Sam Shepardesque trailer trash” – he’s really quite impressive. Playing a Texas police detective who moonlights as a contract killer, Bloom “exudes the chilling control” of one of those characters in a Harold Pinter play “who suddenly arrive and take over”. It’s a coolly effective performance.
Bloom has “got the goods” alright: he commands the stage with “brutish impact”, said Kate Maltby in The Sunday Times. But neither he nor his impressive co-stars are enough to justify the “shallow voyeurism” of Tracy Letts’s “poverty porn” melodrama. The set-up involves an indebted drug dealer who, with his father’s help, plots to murder his mother for her life insurance. “Violence against women bookends the action.” Bloom’s character orders a young woman to strip, and her naked body is “showcased frontal for our viewing pleasure”. There’s also an act of forced fellatio involving a chicken leg. If you can accept all this then, sure, Killer Joe is “gripping”. But it won’t “enrich anyone else’s life”.
I, too, felt uneasy at the use of female nudity, said Michael Billington in The Guardian (although, perhaps in the interests of gender equality, we also get to see Bloom’s bare bottom). Even so, I would absolve Letts (who later wrote August: Osage County) from the charge of exploitation: he is “clearly making a serious point about a society caught between a dimly remembered Christian morality and an all-too-vivid cultural degeneration”. It’s uncomfortable to watch, certainly, but it’s also a “cleverly plotted” play that keeps you hooked from the start. In short, “queasily gripping”.
In Richard Attenborough’s 1982 biographical film of Mahatma Gandhi, Ben Kingsley plays the title role and won an Oscar for it. But according to archivists cataloguing the late director’s voluminous correspondence – there are 70 boxes of letters relating to the making of Gandhi – Kingsley was far from being the first choice. Attenborough it seems, had agonised over the casting, and in desperation had even considered Marlon Brando for the role. This despite the fact that Gandhi was a spindly figure, emaciated by hunger strikes, whereas, by the late 1970s, Brando was monstrously overweight.
Attenborough’s determination to bring the life of the father of Indian independence to the big screen began in the early 1960s. “I would pursue this quest for 20 years,” he wrote in 2008, “suffer all sorts of rejection in trying to raise the finance and very nearly bankrupt myself.” And the first person he approached for the part, said Debbie White in the Daily Mail, was Alec Guinness. “I’m too big, grey, fat and blue-eyed,” Guinness had replied, adding that in his view, “Gandhi should be played by a Hindu.” Yet even after getting funding for his project, Attenborough was still confining his search to a list of white actors, including Dustin Hoffman, Albert Finney, Al Pacino and even Peter Falk (best known for playing TV detective Columbo).
It was only after John Hurt did a screen test for the part and expressed his dismay at how ridiculous he looked, that Attenborough became convinced he needed someone of Indian descent as Gandhi, said Robert Mendick in The Daily Telegraph. Soon after, he chanced to see Kingsley – who was born Krishna Pandit Bhanji to a British mother and a father of Gujarati descent – performing at the Donmar Warehouse. He called in the actor and, having seen his screen test, reportedly sighed, “Well, I suppose you’d better play it then.” Kingsley replied, “I shall be the film’s most humble servant.” Gandhi went on to win eight Oscars.