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Reviews
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Postcards from AmericaElective Affinities As centrepiece of the RSC’s second season of New Work, first seen in Stratford last autumn, this American double-bill, directed by Dominic Cooke, gives Royal Court theatregoers a foretaste of what they can expect when he takes over the Sloane Square helm later this year. These two plays lay bare an almost unimaginable streak of violence and anger lurking in apparently civilised strata of American society, from an elegant tea-sipping Manhattan culture vulture to suburban housewives in the Bible belt. In Elective Affinities, a chilling 20-minute curtain-raiser by David Adjmi, Suzanne Burden is superbly cast as a lady of taste, whose self-satisfied charm and knowing intimacy soon has us eating out of her well-manicured hands, chuckling with delight at her droll put-downs of a best friend, absent husband and society mores in general. But beneath this chic, urbane exterior lurks a savage monster — suddenly barking, almost literally at one moment — who sees no point in routinely assigning innate human rights to the dispossessed, and can recognise no conflict between civilised values and the routine use of torture as a necessary response to terrorism.
Brett Neveu’s Eric LaRue is another glimpse into hell, as a dazed mother struggles to come to terms with the horrible truth that her son Eric has taken a shotgun and pistol to his local high school and (in a Columbine-like massacre) has shot dead three of his classmates in cold blood. With the best of motives and a passion for counselling, a crass local pastor (buoyantly played by Barnaby Kay) now wants to bring her face to face with the mothers whose sons were killed, an inept and finally doomed attempt to help the community move on. Meanwhile her husband (Tom Hodgkins) has turned to Jesus for consolation, and gets a brutal beating from his wife for his single-minded theistic response to her pain and despair. With a washed out face, dead eyes and anxious hands, Lia Williams gives a moving portrayal of this desperate woman, a presbyterian exile in a Lutheran township. And in a horrifying prison scene she confronts her son (Kevin Trainor), anxious for redemption; instead championing his crime as a just retribution for an uncaring and hostile community, a stand-off which leaves them both at the outer limits of despair. This tragically ironic twist is perhaps unlikely for dramatic realism. But it takes its place as yet another telling revelation of a cruel and unjust society turning against itself in crime, loathing, vengeance and self-justification.
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