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I was left entertained but somewhat unpersuaded by the first half of the Royal Court’s new play ‘Violence and Son’. But writer Gary Owen is a clever bastard, and it’s all groundwork for a formidably troubling second half you won’t see coming (unless you read the rest of this review, sorry).
Liam (David Moorst) is a prissy, waspish 17-year-old ‘Doctor Who’ nerd from Humberside who thinks it’s reasonable to wander around a small Welsh Valleys town dressed up in fez and bowtie. He’s here because his beloved mum died of cancer a few months ago, so until his A-Levels are done he has moved in with Rick (Jason Hughes), the feckless father who abandoned him at birth.
To start off with, this is all sitcom-ish fun: bitter Liam fires off witheringly articulate zingers at his brawny dad; Rick soaks them up with roguish good humour and a splash of underlying guilt, offering unsolicited advice – worthy of Danny Dyer’s stint as an agony uncle – on what his son should do about his crush on Jen (Morfydd Clark), a pretty local girl who dates the town’s rugby captain and who Liam has developed an excruciatingly platonic relationship with. Some alarm bells ring when we discover that Rick’s nickname is Vile, short for ‘Violence’, but we are assured this is in the past, and there’s something so cartoonishly enjoyable about both the two performances and Hamish Pirie’s production – which includes full-on ‘Doctor Who’ recreation sequences – that it’s hard to think anything will go seriously awry.
And of course it does, but it’s not what you think: in the final phase, Liam – perhaps inadvertently – does something awful to Jen: maybe thanks to his father’s encouragement, maybe because of something inside him, whether inherited or (surely more likely) intrinsic to his age and gender. Owen turns ‘Violence and Son’ into an unflinching exploration of moral ambiguities of young men: should we condemn the sensitive, grieving, confused Liam as a monster? Or should everything we’ve learned about his character in the two hours we’ve spent with him count for something? I don’t see that Owen gives an answer, but it’s the manner in which he sends us out agonising over the question that makes this such a sucker punch of a play.