Review Hir

Reviewer Peter Barker relishes a vivid satire charting the transformation of a dysfunctional Californian family.  

Hir 
by Taylor Mac

New World Disorder
https://www.bushtheatre.co.uk/

Hir is a provocative and darkly funny look at nation, family and masculinity in contemporary America. It's also one of the highlights of my theatre year so far, thanks to a witty script, taut direction and four outstanding performances.

Isaac Connor is an American marine who was previously tasked while stationed overseas with gathering body parts of military casualties for repatriation.  Now he himself is repatriated, discharged dishonourably and back home.

He had left an identikit Californian working-class family home in an identikit working-class suburb, albeit on reclaimed landfill.

His father Arnold struggled to make a living as a plumber. Sister Maxine was a tomboy on the cusp of adolescence. Isaac's mother Paige, a battered wife, was also beaten down by the sheer bloody awfulness of it all.

Isaac left home to fight a war and he appears to have come home to another one, as gender roles are reimagined and past wrongs revenged.

His mother Paige has thrown off her shackles and ruthlessly rules the household, while father Arnold, cut down by illness and bizarrely costumed by his carers, now sleeps in a box, fed illicit female hormones mixed with his prescription stroke medication.

The soldier's sister has become his brother Max with the Hir of the title being the preferred pronoun, a mixture of his and her, for the transgender sibling.

However, playwright Taylor Mac, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, has created a surreal comedy for serious purposes. He uses this gender change and violent family chaos for a pungent state-of-the-nation analysis after decades of no-wage growth and, yes, the death of the American Dream.

Indeed I felt it has a parallel in Requiem For A Dream, the movie from Hubert Selby Jr's novel chronicling the personal and national drug-fuelled undercurrents in US life. 

Arthur Darvill plays out the trauma as bewildered war veteran Isaac, with his disorientation powerfully culminating in a fit of visceral violent rage.

Ashley McGuire’s mother is a grotesque but uttering some of the funniest lines. Yet she also has a justified anger while providing a tough foil and strop for Isaac’s rising emotions.

As Isaac's made-obsolete father, Andy Williams has a powerful, near-mute brooding presence suffering fresh daily humiliations at the hands of his newly liberated spouse.

Griffyn Gilligan's teenager is the distilled symbol of change in Hir, able to use hormones purchased on line to transform hir-self but writer Mac manages to take all the changes within the family to unexpected places.

Designer Ben Stone's traverse set forces the audience to face each other  across the battleground of a prefab home in disarray that, like the family, has been beaten up and is falling apart.

Nadia Fall directs this kitchen-sink satire with gleeful discipline, keeping up the laughs and, especially in the second half, its anarchy, tension and adrenalin-fuelled pace.

In the end, it seems as if Isaac may be America's sacrifice just as another biblical Isaac is Abraham's intended offering. Unlike his namesake, Isaac Connor may never be able to surface from the chaos around him, yet the fate of his mother and sibling at the play's finish hangs tantalisingly up in the air.

For all its mining of serious issues, Hir remains an absurdist social comedy - if an unsettling one. It finally transforms itself into a green light meditation on a grotesque topsy turvydom reflecting individual, family and national upheavals.

Review Fool For Love

Fool For Love
by Sam Shepherd

Looking For Mr Right
http://found111.co.uk/

It's a final trip up the stairs to see a play at found 111i n the former Central St Martin's School School of Art. The theatre company is now bidding farewell to its grunge venue and seeking another site-specific space after its successful sojourn on Charing Cross Road.

In the meantime, it's back to familiar Sam Shepard territory, a motel room in California's Mojave Desert where May (Lydia Wilson) and Eddie (Adam Rothenberg) brawl and tear themselves apart.

Eddie has tracked down May, driving over a thousand miles, he says, to pluck her up and take her to a piece of land he has bought in Wyoming where he plans to raise horses, chickens and make a place for May.

But he finds May, who maintains she has now reinvented herself as a good citizen, gained a job and a beau, more than reluctant to drop everything and drive back with him in his horse truck.

All the while, a lanky, grizzled Marlboro Man spectre (Joe McGann) watches over the pair while into the secrets, lies and battles comes the unsuspecting gentle Martin (Luke Neal) who is wooing May. 

A two-level thrust stage designed by Ben Stones works on two levels, on low stilts at the back is the run-down motel room with its door smeared with grime.

Then in front a gravelly front yard reaches out to the audience in this initimate venue. Angular neon lights and fairy lights also flash and flicker within the physical and psychic space.

It's a curious self-conscious piece which mixes the hardscrabble life of near-trailer trash folks with the language of the movie business. As May, Wilson brings a taut, stubborn fragility, struggling to free herself from the emotional lassoo pulling her towards tequila-drinking Eddie, away from Martin.

These are characters, apart from Martin, who are all physically and mentally in their own self-contained space yet affecting each other's lives. This double perspective doesn't always catch fire in Simon Evans' production, even if the individual performances remain strong with a strain of dark humour.

A quick passing one-act drama, the laconic play shoots its arrow and lands in just over an hour. The clanging, slamming door soundscape (sound design by Edward Lewis) takes us inside the characters as much as their words and actions.

A final stunning image with lighting by Elliot Griggs merges the movies and the itinerant world of these abandoned souls. With its lingering thin, whip sharp quality, this Fool For Love ultimately finds an elemental power. It's an amber/green light from your own bareback theatre reviewing TLT and her trusty steed.

Review Bug

Bug
By Tracy Letts

Swatting It
 http://found111.co.uk/ 

Strange and horrible things happen in  fictional motels:  Stabbings in showers in Psycho, paedophilia in Lolita, Thelma and Louise running from  the law before a final cliff-hanger,  a helpless female saved from mobsters by a Brit secret service agent in the novel The Spy Who Loved Me, drugs and murder in Touch of Evil. 

To this litany of weirdness and characters, playwright Tracy Letts added Agnes and Peter in Bug. Pothead Agnes (Kate Fleetwood)  is holed up in an Oaklahoma motel room with only a crack pipe for company, avoiding her ex-con ex-husband Jerry (Alec Newman). 

That's save for  the occasional visit of lesbian friend RC (Daisy Lewis). RC brings along gentle giant (shades of Steinbeck another motel afficianado) Peter (James Norton), seemingly a Gulf War veteran who introduces himself fetchingly saying, "I'm not an axe murderer", only that he "makes people nervous" because he "picks up on things".

He's certainly no Jack Torrance in The Shining , but gradually Peter starts to drop the odd line drawing Agnes, already susceptible to National Enquirer type stories,  into a world view veering from the comically conspiratorial to the fatally self-destructive. 

And those things he picks up on? They turn out to have a corporeal manifestation - a supposed insect infestation where the remedy proves worse than living with those pesky microscopic critters.

Bug, mixing Hitchcock with Kafka with Hollywood and comic book scifi horror, a hefty dollop of the X-Files and even a nightmare possibly from an Ian McEwan novel,  premiered in London in 1996.

But this was also post Watergate and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and very real health fears for Gulf War veterans. And the year of a real Asian beetle infestation in New York plus journalists revealing  the CIA promotion of crack cocaine importation to fund right-wing rebel groups in Nicaragua.

Yet in the end, the power of Bug the play lies not in state conspiracy, but how far over the edge the isolated and disappointed - and drug-addled - can be pushed and nudged into pushing themselves.

Still, lines thrown in at times - "Women aren't my bag" and "I'm playing devil's advocate" throw into question the delusion and self-knowledge of the couple. If - in a play written before mass internet usage - the media, literature, film, the news, even the psychology of acting and the creation of "character" are the instigators or results of tragedy.

With the audience as voyeurs on every side and looming plaster beams - there's a Psycho bathroom in one corner, the seedy motel room door and window at the other - it's an evening of proximities.

The changing light (lighting designer Richard Howell) outside is just discernible through the cheap curtains as Agnes crosses to the mini bar in the third corner wedged between members of the audience. Indeed viewed from above the bedroom set may even resemble a bug's compound eye.;)

There are subtle sound effects from Edward Lewis from the first chirping cricket (it's not a spoiler to say that this jiminy cricket gets the chop)  to the real or imaginary helicopters circling overhead near the end.

The Charing Cross Road venue proves perfect for this visceral grunge production directed by Simon Evans (oh, did we mention James Norton was in it?:)), both as a former art school and as the dilapidated grafitti-strewn home of Found 111. Whether the play would have the same impact on a formal proscenium stage is debatable.

Kate Fleetwood's Agnes and James Norton's Peter crash and burn, gnawing into themselves, within touching distance and it's the physical nearness which resonates, Daisy Lewis's RC and Alec Newman's Jerry frame the action of the junkie couple with strong performances. While Carl Prekopp's role of Dr Sweet  seems not so much underwritten as deliberately jarring.

With a nightmarish comic book quality, TLT and her own little bug(gy) laughed,  cringed and gasped spontaneously in the right places. Be prepared for blood, gore, dentistry beyond Marathon Man, alongside extreme population pest control and you'll have an enjoyable shlock horror rollercoaster evening. A green light.