In the Alice in Wonderland logic of the National Rifle Association, “guns don’t kill people, people do”. It’s an aphorism that pretends to be revelatory but is actually the opposite. At best it is a deflection, at worst irresponsible. The 7,074 people who died in US shootings in the first half of this year do not have the privilege of debating whether they were slaughtered by man or machine. As Eddie Izzard once said, “I think the gun helps.”
Martín Zimmerman’s On the Exhale, first seen in 2017 and now given its UK premiere in a focused production by Christopher Haydon for China Plate and Audible, is an attempt to get under the skin of a debate that tells you more about America’s fraught relationship with its history and constitution than it does about reasoned argument. In this story about a bereaved mother reeling from the shock of a school massacre, assault rifle and shooter merge to become one and the same. The gun is an extension of the person carrying it.
As the playwright presents it, the student with a pistol under his belt is transformed. Typically, the weapon takes wounded male privilege (because it is so often thus) and replaces it with power. It’s a power that imbalances every relationship. No one will contradict, still less confront, the person in the room with the capacity to gun you down.
Dreaming of taking revenge after the shooting, the bereaved woman becomes so transfixed by the rifle she buys (a three-minute transaction requiring no more than a driver’s license) that it becomes a living presence. Venturing into the heart of darkness, she realises she “can’t be trusted to control herself around machines of such seductive power”.
Performed in a country where the gun lobby has no sway, the play risks simply confirming our guns-are-bad prejudices. It sidesteps this thanks to the intensity of Zimmerman’s second-person script, which never takes you quite where you expect, and the mesmerising performance of Polly Frame. Still, matter-of-fact and measured, her delivery is gripping in its economy and hits home like a bullet.
- At the Traverse, Edinburgh, until 26 August. Box office: 0131-228 1404. Then at Oxford Playhouse, 28 August–1 September. Box office: 01865 305305.
