Killer Joe
Killer Joe, Downstairs Belvoir Street, to November 2; ph: 9699 3444 or www.belvoir.com.au
PLAYWRIGHT Tracy Letts is currently enjoying a huge success on Broadway with August: Osage County (Pulitzer Prize plus five Tony awards). Melbourne Theatre Company is staging a production of the play next year, but it won't be in Sydney any time soon so it’s either timely or fortuitous that B Sharp has programmed his 1996 play, Killer Joe. It started out in Chicago in 1993, went on to success at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; transferred to a small theatre in London, then to a larger one. It’s been performed before in Sydney too. Not surprising really as the story and roles are a series of spectacular gifts to talented actors
Killer Joe is theatre writing at its blackest, bleakest and most brilliant. It’s set in a Texas trailer park where even the trash is more appealing than the White Trash inhabitants of the place. For reasons not really apparent – except that Cannon is playing on the permanently mumbling TV – it’s the 1970s, although the Smith family is oblivious to the outside world and also totally oblivious to the concept of an inner world.
Ansel Smith (Josh Quong Tart) is, if not exactly the patriarch, then definitely the crack-scratching, beer-swilling chief blob who seems determined to stay at the very bottom of the human heap. His harpy second wife Sharla (Anita Hegh) is no match for this kind of nihilism but her uninhibited energy and anger in the face of a life of bugger-all is weirdly exhilarating.
Ansel's son Chris (Robin Goldsworthy) is also a loser of eye-watering incapability, but his ferrety cunning takes him a disastrous rung up the ladder from inert hopelessness when he falls foul of a violent drug dealer. Unfortunately for Chris, the stash of gear he was supposed to sell for the dealer was discovered by his mother. She sold it to pay for her car repairs. Oops.
Chris wants his dad to help him pay back the five big ones he owes the dealer. Ansel probably doesn't have five bucks, and in any case, is not about to hand over even that much to his son. But Chris has an idea that involves a local cop who is said to moonlight as a hired assassin and his mother's life policy – payable on her death.
Peripheral but at the same time strangely central to the Smith family is Dottie (Maeve Dermody) Chris's younger sister. She seems fey and away with the pixies but it turns out that as a child she survived her mother's attempt to smother her and is actually mildly brain-damaged but remarkably acute in an airy kind of way. The family tries to keep things from her, to avoid upsetting her, but it becomes quickly apparent that few tricks pass Dottie by.
Enter the local assassin, Killer Joe Cooper (Chris Stollery). As it's the 1970s chances are he's watched The Virginian because he dresses like him – all in black – but has not adopted the TV cowboy's Sir Galahad approach to life. Killer Joe is scary. The way he insinuates himself into the hopeless family is more than scary. His attempts at charm are plain terrifying. Chris Stollery has created a masterpiece of quietly controlled venom, he's absolutely on top form here.
Director Iain Sinclair has retained the play's original Texan settingwhich makes more sense than transposing it to anywhere else – even outback Queensland – as there is something about Texas, with or without George W Bush, that makes it perfect for this depiction of under class-grand guignol. Sinclair has also persuaded his actors to go for it in terms of the play's physical demands and the result, in the close confines of the Downstairs theatre, is electrifying.
Punctuating the action, between scenes, are live fragments of country-blues songs by four-piece band the Snowdroppers. There are those who feel their presence interrupts and diffuses the steadily rising tension; for others, they are tough enough and lyrically flophouse-rough enough to be a logical part of the action. They also bring a momentary change of pace that leavens what would otherwise be a relentless journey to a denouement that manages to be startling in a play full of shocks and surprises.
It's not often that a stage play sets out to be terrifying and pulls it off. The script is brilliant but is equalled by these actors who immerse themselves in the world of the play and bring it to life without obvious effort. Designer Luke Ede has fashioned a wretched trailer home set that has to be the last stop before total oblivion.
If you've read this far you may be wondering why anyone would want to sit through it, but the thing is, it's mesmerisingly good, funny to the point of making you gasp in horror at yourself, and although I'm slightly nervous of saying so, I loved every awful, hilarious fascinating (and tragic) minute of it.
