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 Things I Know To Be True

Things I Know To Be True
by Andrew Bovell

Never Promised You A Rose Garden
http://www.lyric.co.uk/

Somewhere in the suburbs of Adelaide live the Price family.  Father Bob (Ewan Stewart) tends his garden complete with manicured rose bushes, years after taking redundancy from a car factory. Mum Fran (Imogen Stubbs) now wears the earning trousers, working as a nurse at the local hospital while keeping the household together.

Meanwhile the four grown-up kids are spreading their wings in tentative flight with varying degrees of success. The youngest Rosie (Kirsty Oswald) sets off alone on a gap year in Europe, ending up in Berlin only to have her heart broken, her Euros stolen and to be ordered out of the house where a night of passion turns out to be a defeat and soulless trickery.

The expectations of Pip (Natalie Casey) sour and she hardens herself, ambitious in her work and love life, willing to leave her husband and, temporarily, her kids for a new job and lover in Vancouver.

The two sons are drawn with less detail. Tender Mark (Matthew Barker), an adored brother is ready to make a momentous change in his life. Shiny-suited wide-boy accountant Ben (Richard Mylan) is determined to compete and party with his colleagues before discovering he will be offered up as a token sacrifice by them when things go wrong.

Originally premiered in Adelaide in May this year (2016), the actors in the London staging co-directed by Geordie Brookman and Scott Graham, keep their English accents. This reminded us somewhat of at least one fairly recent production of Our Town which worked well. But in this case, we're not so sure.

Nevertheless Imogen Stubbs is outstanding as the family matriarch bluff, northern Fran, even if the script sometimes slightly jars making her more male than Stewart's more gentle, seemingly solitary father Bob, a gardener with his wheelbarrow, eventually in vain, laying out the boundaries in a medieval rose garden.

While it was written earlier than the vote, this felt for us something of a Brexit Commonwealth tale. Rosie is robbed of her heart and Euros in Berlin and has to return to her family. Pip ends up in Vancouver with a question mark over the future of her children.

Mark seems to only have one story line and we never learn his trade or profession but he advises his sometimes unwittingly crass parents to learn about his choice in life through books and websites. Ben's story is really intriguing - maybe this is why it feels pushed down in this production but never followed through with its implications for his trade, his fate and his family's future seemingly bound into extra-judicial financial servitude for what he has done.

The whole is polished, with fluid staging (set and lighting by Geoff Cobham with music by Nils Frahm) and choreography to reflect mental states and change the pace. Even so, the piece felt hugely influenced by recent TV family dramas such as Transparent with its different threads on family members.

In its effort to be global, on stage at least, something appears to be lost. There are times when, like some rebellious family member, we even felt resentful we were somehow being subjected to a gentle but insistent  indoctrination in "Things I Know To Be True" which made us more obstinate in our analysis rather than enveloping us in the story.

There's a lot to admire - Natalie Casey and Ewan Stewart especially match Stubbs' powerhouse performance in their own ways - and  some of the audience around us were wiping away tears by the end. However, it left us unaffected and, while technically superb, it's an amber light.

PS However we can't resist reference to a 1970s' country and western crossover classic which sprang to mind and seems fitting for this piece. .