Imagining someone's teeth being hammered down their throat gave us all a cathartic shudder

You have to be tough to be a theatre critic. Not because of the late nights, or the mealtimes. (A cheese sandwich at 6pm or mushroom risotto at 11pm? The choice is yours, the indigestion preordained.) No, the rigour is about staying in your seat when hideously violent acts are taking place just in front of your nose. When it comes to cinematic violence, I have long known I am a bit of a wuss. I went to see the Brit flick Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and had to interview the director, Guy Ritchie, immediately afterwards. The encounter went something like this:

RM: (quavering) "So, I found the violence in this film a bit hard to take."

GR: (silence)

RM: "Did you think it was in any way arbitrary or gratuitous?"

GR: (witheringly) "No."

I've had similar encounters with Quentin Tarantino.

I simply don't have the mindset for violent films, and do my best to avoid them. But I always thought the theatre was a different animal. OK, so the "Out, vile jelly" moment in King Lear gives one a nasty swerve, but it's hardly akin to Tarantino's Ear Amputation moment in Reservoir Dogs.

Yet this assumption might have to be reviewed. At the moment, a night out at the theatre in London means, for me, a night behind the palms of my hands. There's Julius Caesar at the Barbican and Henry IV at the National, both of which have plots that rely on who is at the sharp end of the sword, so there's a lot of stabbing and sword-waving. So far, so traditional.

But Dennis Kelly's Osama the Hero at the Hampstead Theatre takes on-stage brutality and torture to a baroque level. Halfway through, one of the protagonists, a schoolboy, is bound and gagged, strapped into a chair and threatened with being "tapped" on the forehead with a hammer. By a woman. Ten gruesome minutes later, he is on his back, still strapped to the chair, and bludgeoned to death. I wasn't the only one behind my hands; the man next to me was equally horrified.

It had to be done, though. The hammer episode was crucial to the play. In a way, it was the play - which is presumably why Kelly chose to have it on stage, gruesomely present, rather than in the usual place for theatrical bloodletting: off-stage in the wings. As it was, imagining someone's teeth being hammered down their throat gave us all such a genuinely cathartic shudder that the point of the evening was made completely clear. Which is, surely, the aim of any playwright.

Meanwhile, Theatre of Blood, a Vincent Price horror film that the National has for some reason decided to put on stage, revels in bumping off its cast in the most pantomimic way possible, and people love it. The night I saw it, the audience was whooping with joy as characters were drowned, suffocated, burned alive, disembowelled and skewered. There was even a couple of dear little dogs that were put through a mincer, which naturally sent quite a lot of people back behind their hands.

Despite not wishing to be a killjoy, by the end of it all I did come over a bit Lock, Stock. I know it was meant to be funny, but somehow blood flying up in great gouts on to the stage curtains, just for laughs, seemed a bit sad.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website