(3 / 5)
Sarah Kosar’s last play, Mumburger was about a family whose mother’s last wish when she died was for them to eat her body, in burger form. It was about processing grief and processing meat. Compelling and repulsive by turns.
This new, more large-scope work was actually written before Mumburger. It was Kosar’s calling card in 2013 when she moved to London from America and got accepted into some prestigious young writers’ schemes.
Armadillo is set in America. It’s about a girl, Sam, who was abducted when she was 13 and returned to her family a couple of days later, seemingly unscathed. But, aged 27, she begins reliving the trauma when she sees on TV (a fractured background projection of nightmarish faces conveys the news) another young girl has been abducted.
She also likes to have sex with guns involved, because they make her feel safe, but Sam and her husband John are forced to go cold turkey after a sex game goes bad.
The guns are treated like an addiction; the couple have a mantra of abstinence – ‘no gun, more fun’ which they repeat whenever tempted to revert back to their old ways.
Sam, the armadillo, is a tough but disturbed, slight girl, dressed like a ninja turtle (or, indeed an armadillo) in green neon socks, brown khakis and tight green tank top, which she sheds layers off but it always looks the same (symbolic, eh?). She is the perfect vehicle to persuade us that, in a violent world, guns can be a useful form of protection – but the story doesn’t go far enough to convince us that guns are ever necessary – and I would have liked to have been taken up to that point of sympathising with Sam’s need for a gun.
This production would probably play differently in America, where owning a firearm is a constitutional right – the water pistols they use to try to help them get clean from their gun addiction might seem more ridiculous in a country where you can pick up a pink coloured rifle ‘for girls’ from the weapons aisle in K-mart.
I also wondered if the script had been tweaked and somewhat neutered with the British audience in mind – the overall message of the play was a little muddled and obscure and I wondered if this was due to a toning down of possible references to American gun law from a director’s perspective or if the writer had always wanted to make an ambiguous message.
Anyway, the result was that I left feeling a little bit unclear on what the main message was. The play touches on many intriguing themes like trauma, the twisted way abuse makes people feel, an individual’s right to choose and, of course, gun ownership but there wasn’t a clear journey for any of the themes.
Direction by Sarah Joyce is confident and poised; taught tableaux sex scenes, with lights flickering on and off, mirror the darker, more sinister enactments of the final moments – and each scene is directed with an underpinning of realistic and truthful actions – this production is not played for laughs, and doesn’t acknowledge its own slightly unusual premise, and this makes it utterly believable.
It’s also testament to Kosar’s confident writing and the conviction of the three actors – Michelle Fox as Sam, the Armadillo of the story, Mark Quartley as John, her husband, and Nima Taleghani as Sam’s dopey brother Scotty – that potentially implausible scenes are rendered believable.
Designer Jasmine Swan has cluttered the set with the accoutrements of a modern apartment; there’s a TV, a computer, a sofa, loo, shower, bed, pond, trees – it’s a bit encumbered and rather literal for a play that dips its toes into the surreal.
The shower is particularly redundant – none of the characters takes a shower – and then when you finally see a use for the pond, when Sam decides to go swimming, she doesn’t use the pond. Instead, the bed becomes a symbol for the swimming pool – and taking a deep-dive into her subconscious.
I felt that a bed a fridge and a sofa would have been sufficient to suggest an apartment and allow more space for the actors to play their gun-fights without being restricted by so much furniture.
It was an interesting, smart production, but might have benefited from less clutter, both physically and narratively.