AFTER THE SHOOTING
Despite the title, Anna Yates’ setting in an episcopalian church room full of calm skylight, and one effective moment near the end, Fran Kranz’ tense 105-minute play draws little from any Christian sensibility of forgiveness or eternity. It concerns, like James Graham’s PUNCH but in real time, an episode of restorative justice. In this case it is vicarious on both sides: the perpetrator is dead. His parents are at a table with parents of one victim. The scene is set before, Susie Trayling’s nervous Judy and the teenage (possibly community-service) assistant Brandon , fuss about setting up, worry whther there should be coffee and food . Kendra, a masterful social-work figure, checks it up. And then the pairs arrive.
We do not for a while know the full circumstance, or whether the victim was targeted. Kranz’s technique, directed with purposefu slowness by Carrie Cracknell, is uninterested in projection or , for a while, building much dramatic tension. This actually is oddly effective, because the cast is so fine: a restless audience impatience grows in the first half-hour as we laboriously work out that Jay and Gail (Adeel Akhtar and Lyndsey Marshal) lost a son to the gun-toting,too-much online youngest of the slightly more socially upmarket Richard and Linda (Paul Hilton and Monica Dolan).
But tension rises, and all four central figures are spot-on, deeply into character, delicately created individuals. Hilton’s Richard is lawyerly, too calm for comfort until one devastating moment reveals how intensely, malely, stoically he has faced the horror of his son’s deed and his own failure. Dolan is more emotional, perilously needy to speak for the child who was once her baby, shielding herself from his dangerousness by understanding, somehow, his pain. In the aftermath of the inquiry’s blame in the Rudakubana case that hits hard.
Meanwhile the victim’s mother is torn between womanly empathy and her own anger., and Akhtar’s Jay displays sudden violent anger, a useless righteousness which in one stunning moment is matched by Paul Hilton’s deadly forensic awareness of his boy’s deed. He, we learn significantly, fought to join the victims’ families to visit the terrible scene and see the outlines and the blood. He insisted that he had a right o “To mourn 11. Not just 10” .
It’s strong stuff, well done. And interesting to have ,from Kranz, an American perspective on this American plague. Because face it: a British writer would find it hard to leave out the one hard question which here, shrieks by its absence: US gun law , kids having no trouble getting hold of things that can kill a dozen in thirty seconds . Also, if it had been written a genration earlier on either side of the Atlantic an appeal to religious faith, to pray together, would also probably have been part of the conversation. Insteadm the nearest thing for the poor couples is to hold a brief silence together. Until the fuss about clearing up the room and heading for their cars begins.
Donmarwarehouse.com to 6 june
rating 3
theatreCat 