Review Killology

Killology
by Gary Owen

Loose Ends
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Killology intertwines three male lives and three monologues: a troubled youngster, a middle-aged man seemingly his father and an ultra successful new media entrepreneur.

On designer Gary McCann's black box set of tangled overhead wires, humps of black coils on the ground, as well as oily slicks, the spotlight at first falls in turn on each of the trio, although eventually the lives appear to tangle with each other.

This is a play with its intense focus on each of the three men which stands and falls by the performances and the three performances are gripping. Seán Gleeson's Alan, deceptively open-faced and pleasant, speaks the first words of the drama.

Siôn Daniel Young's Davey, is a boy whose  relationships with his mother and a woman teacher and a dependent female pet are skewed by the real life violence where he lives. Richard Mylan is the glib businessman who has been given every opportunity in life made callous by the 1990s' games of his schooldays  but seeing the potential in a video game concentrating on the process rather than the result.   

The individual narrations of the characters do not slot neatly into place with each other. There are many moments which seem to stretch plausibility (although TLT may be hyper-nitpicking having covered numerous employment tribunals and inquests as a news reporter) and have no continuity.

There may be an explanation for this - the humps of black coils and broken off wires could even indicate a damaged brain or may, at a stretch, be a critique of movie and TV drama relying on editing and sensation rather than the piece being properly plotted. However this is not clear and may be an assumption on our part.

So we have a problem with the play's structure. The repetitive and open ended  nature of computer games, the papering over of the film editing process, bringing in mental health problems as a framework, in our opinion, need to have, in our opinion, an acompanying dramatic argument.

Killology is directed fluently by Rachel O'Riordan and equally fluently written by Gary Owen, but if any or all of the motives for holes in the plot, almost as numerous as stars in the sky, are what we've said, it feels a bit of a cop out because the theatrical argument doesn't go anywhere. It feels too much like fragments or the template for a movie or a TV series.

To be fair, the video games' entrepreneur does give an obviously specious reason for the morality of a game involving prolonged torture and the father's discovery of a community online suddenly reverses the power dynamics. There is a potentially intriguing confusing of the legal set up in Britain and the US in the 1970s. But these elements are introduced rather than explored. 

Killology is a term coined in 1996 by a former American soldier, David Grossman, who is now an author and trainer. Killology is defined on one website as focussing "on the reactions of healthy people in killing circumstances (such as police and military in combat) and the factors that enable and restrain killing in these situations."

Grossman, who is in the playtext acknowledgments, seems to have had considerable success  in his post-military career, lecturing to American police officers, although his theories and methodology have also attracted criticism.

Killology has the benefit of excellent performances from the cast, but maybe the mention of three scenic artists (Charlotte Neville, Phoebe Tomkin and Maren von Wachenfeldt) in the list of creatives indicate a cinematic rather than stage-geared piece. If you like this sort of thing, you're gonna love this. We found it rather stretched out to a two-act play and it's an upper range amber light.

PS TLT managed to put the wrong actor's name for video games entrepreneur Paul at first - it is very definitely Richard Mylan.

Review Chigger Foot Boys

Peter Barker is impressed by a new Great War play charting how the experience of loyal Jamaican volunteers eventually strengthened the bid to break free from the British Empire

Chigger Foot Boys
by Patricia Crumper

The Domino Effect
https://www.tara-arts.com/

When Britain entered the First World War, the British Isles were not the only islands dragged into the conflict.

For Britain still had an Empire, the envy of rival nations including Germany, and war against Britain triggered its own domino effect, drawing in its subjects, including over 15,000 West Indian volunteers, to fight for the mother country.   

Chigger Foot Boys is a timely reminder of the human role played in an inhuman conflict by the people of the West Indies who served in the British Armed forces but faced discrimination from their white colleagues and colonial masters as well as death.

Patricia Crumper's new play starts in a rum bar in Jamaica in 1914 where banter, dominoes and emotions are all played with.

Structured as a series of flashforwards, always returning to the Kingston bar, it tracks and backtracks through the Empire’s conflict: how it affected lives in Jamaica and beyond; how hopes were met and dashed and futures shaped.

Chigger foot boy is  a West Indian derisory term for the itinerant workers of the countryside,  boys too poor to afford shoes whose feet are afflicted by a blood-sucking bug, the chigger.  Mortie (played with wide-eyed honesty by Ike Bennett), a future army recruit, is up from the country for the first time, entering a Kingston rum bar.

Behind the bar is Medora (convincingly feisty Suzette Llewellyn), a strong-minded businesswoman .  She is pursued by handsome and worldly-wise Linton (Stanley J. Browne in an engaging perfomance), who is a career soldier.

They are joined by two middle-class brothers in their late teens and, like Mortie, future volunteers for King and Country. Charming Roy (John Leader), the younger brother and Rhodes-Scholar Norman (Jonathan Chambers), who later took the lead, rising up from the ranks of war veterans, in the fight for Jamaican independence.  .

From here there are highs, and then the predictable deaths -- punctuated by the institutional and personal racism that the chigger foot boys encountered fighting for an Imperial government which considered them only fit for labour battalions and almost entirely excluded them from the officer class. 

Some survived and. inspired by the leaflets of nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, started to make sense of their own lives.  

The future is really in Norman’s hands and Chambers gives a tender and complex performance. Where Medora’s independent spirit and Garvey-inspired radicalism are emotional drivers of the play, it is Norman’s speech towards the end which locates its guts.

“People like us, people who have bought into the illusion that we are better than those around us because the Empire pats us on the head and allows us a little education, we’re just grist to the mill. Cannon fodder. And the closer we are drawn to the maw of the machine, the deeper we look into its heart…".

Chigger Foot Boys is a gripping, vivid production with a strong cast, directed by Irina Brown. Set designer Louis Price uses the theatre's bare brick back wall as backdrop, decorated only with an outline map of Britain and one of Jamaica, both painted with the Union Jack. The turning pages of a calendar signal scene changes. 

The little known tale of the Jamaican contribution to First World War victory, its tragedies and consequences, is a story that deserves exploration.  Turning Chigger Foot Boy from an insult into a term of honour, the Chigger Foot Boys is a dramatically satisfying and thought-provoking green light play,