TOWIE meets Blasted by way of the Iliad in this breezily provocative fourth play from rising star playwright Ava Pickett. Bloodsport is both fresh but also pleasingly of a piece with Pickett’s other work, insofar as like her previous plays – even breakthrough Tudor smash 1536 – it’s set in Essex. In fact it’s not even her first play set in a slightly vulgar Essex living room (although the decor here is a lot whiter than in her very funny adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma).
Bloodsport takes place in the aftermath of a Trojan War of sorts, although there’s no Greece or Troy but rather some kind of civil unrest that’s gripped the UK. Smartly, Pickett never defines precisely what this is or exactly what has happened: it may have been a gang war, it may have been closer to the recent nationalist protests (it’s clear the Trojan equivalents were deemed to be ‘foreign’ on some level), it may have been a full-scale civil war. When Gerard Monaco’s terrifyingly toxic Agamemnon-proxy Mario comes back into the home he shares with his wife Cee (Laura Aikman), he talks about ‘New England’, as if the country has been remade wholesale.
He’s joined by his malleable younger brother Marcus (Jay Taylor, in the Menelaus role) and a traumatised, blood-spattered Helen (Michelle Dockery), shivering in her nightwear, who everyone seems to be trying to ignore.
After an awkward homecoming defined by Mario’s triumphal belligerence, all signs - including the intro from Ethan Moorhouse’s poetic Essex-bloke chorus – point to this being about the attempted reconciliation between Dockery’s Helen and Aikman’s Cee. As the chorus tells us, they were inseparable best friends until 10 years ago, when Helen abruptly absconded with Paris, a charming man she met down the pub. Now, reunited after a decade, it’s awkward: dutiful blonde Essex wife Cee blames the freespirited Helen for abandioning her, but also for the conflict, which claimed the life of her daughter.
It’s about the pervasive effect of toxic masculinity on British society
Bloodsport is not not about two old friends attempting to reconnect. But after the men have gone down the pub, events spiral dizzyingly out of control: without wishing to give too much away, let’s say that Dockery’s Helen is not the broken shell of a woman that she initially appears to be.
At its heart it’s about the pervasive effect of toxic masculinity on British society. In 1536, Pickett pondered how the distant Henry VIII’s treatment of Anne Boleyn might have rippled out into how women were treated in society more generally. Here, she considers how the nationalism, gang culture and ‘honour’ that Mario represents all ultimately stem from his attitude towards women and his inability to get over town beauty Helen repeatedly rejecting him as a teenager, and how many lives that has ruined.
It’s also a consideration of women’s responsibility too, and whether the liberated Helen really does have the world better figured out than the dutiful Cee, who was a far better mother to her dead daughter than Helen ever was to her living one,
Again I don’t want to get too into how all this plays out, but nobody does foul-mouthed feminist subversion with an Essex drawl anything like Pickett. I mean, I don’t even think there’s any obvious competition, but the parade of Hollywood A-listers spotted at 1536 is very telling indeed, and certainly you have to think notable attendee Quentin Tarantino would dug this one too.
I have mixed feelings about the ending, a sardonic comment on white feminism that’s momentarily satisfying but also feels more like an arch observation than a proper end to the various character arcs. But this is a minor quibble. New-ish Stratford East boss Lisa Spirling has left it a while to helm a play on her own stage, but her pacey, emphatic direction is spot on. And there are some tremendous performances: in what is virtually her professional stage debut, TV veteran Aikman is particularly great as Cee, a woman who has tried to outsource her worldview to her husband, but who is undergoing a painfully perceptive awakening. And rising star Maimuna Memon is a great get as Dani, the cheerily incompetent cleaner who may be a lot more than she appears.
Really, though, the playwright is the star. With 1536 set to be adapted for TV and Pickett also working on a Joan of Arc film with Baz Luhrman (it would be funny if that was set in Essex too) you can’t help but wonder if her furious burst of theatrical energy – four plays in two years – is going to last. She’s on the fast track to national treasure status: let’s enjoy the theatre bit for as long as it lasts.
