Paul has made a killing with a computer game he invented in a fit of pique at his dad, who thought he was wasting the advantages a privileged childhood had bought him. In the game, Killology, players score extra points for demonstrating creativity in the way they torture their victims. Feed them through a mincer feet first? Go up a level. Paul says the game is deeply moral because points are deducted if you look away from the screen while inflicting pain.
Alan is trying to overcome his own horror as he plots retribution on the man he holds responsible for murdering his son. But did he neglect his own duty, leaving his son unprotected and with no idea what it means to be a man? Then there is young Davey, raised in poverty by his mum. He is left negotiating his violent neighbourhood, where everyone turns a blind eye to the bullies who hold sway. “You can’t tell your mum the streets are full of psychos and it’s pure fluke you get home alive every night,” he reasons.
These interconnected stories swirl around each other in the monologues in this heartbreaking, painful three-hander, written by Gary Owen (Iphigenia in Splott) and performed by Richard Mylan, Seán Gleeson and Sion Daniel Young. It’s played out on a desolate landscape in Rachel O’Riordan’s pitch-perfect, exquisitely performed production. Gary McCann’s design suggests the oil slicks and coiled slag heaps of the past, as well as the cables of new industry that deliver virtual realities into our homes. There’s unsettling, menacing sound, too, from Simon Slater.
Owen’s jaggedly tender script plays with fantasy and reality, and like an online game it offers alternate possibilities as it explores what really happens alongside what could have happened. What if a young boy looking at the stars with his father doesn’t misinterpret the words “You can be anything you want” as an invitation to selfishness? What if a father does not leave but keeps bouncing his gurgling son on the bed? What if a son cares lovingly for his dying father?
More than one kind of revenge is played out in this gripping evening, which never shirks the terror of love – particularly parental love – and which connects fatherhood and taking care of family with looking after each other in the wider community. It’s an open wound of a play – raw and sore – but full of compassion too.
- At the Sherman theatre, Cardiff, until 8 April. Box office: 029-2064 6900. Then at the Royal Court, London, 25 May-24 June. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
