I was both moved by and a little annoyed at Mass. This story of two sets of bereaved parents attempting rapprochement in the aftermath of a high school shooting is the debut play by US actor and filmmaker Fran Kranz. He scored a low-key indie cinema success with the screen version of Mass, a 2021 film you’d be excused for not having heard of as it’s one of those flicks that got released to literally four cinemas.
Transposed to the stage, it retains an awkward filmic structure, bookended by extraneous scenes in which two staff members at the church hall in which it’s set fret over getting the space ready for the meeting. Rochelle Rose’s Kendra – the facilitator of the meet – swoops in with a very icy American efficiency that teeters on the pass agg. But it’s all irrelevant to the plot, and it feels like either more should have been made of these characters or much less.
The meat is the meeting. Four great Brit actors play the parents, and I suppose it’s a very small spoiler to say that at first we’re not entirely sure who is mum and dad to the victim, and who the shooter. Is it Adeel Akhtar’s forcedly cheerful Jay and brittler wife Gail (Lyndsey Marshal)? Or is it the more visibly broken down and subdued Linda (Monica Dolan) and Richard (Paul Hilton), whose marriage is implied to have broken down?
It’s not a mystery that Carre Cracknell’s naturalistic production attempts to drag out for a great length of time, but the five or 10 minutes of ambiguity underscore the essential point of the play - that both sets of parents are in a profound state of grief, and that it’s ultimately dehumanising to suggest the killer's parents should be treated as accomplices or pariahs.
Kranz’s text deftly sketches out – without over-explaining – a relationship that already exists between the two parties. The play is set years after the shootings and there have been letters exchanged (plus court proceedings). They know each other but they’re never sat down to talk about what happened. And at first there’s a sort of bonhomie as they lock into an extricating cycle of pleasantries, before Gail finally shatters the ice. From there it’s a fiery, tender tumult of hurt, rage and above all regret as they exchange stories from their kids’ lives and agonise over what changes could have been made to have altered the now unalterable. They stew in guilt.
There is fine, nuanced acting work all round. It’s accentuated by Anna Yates’ subtly revolving set. And the cast have a lot to work with in Krantz’s text, which is a study in powerfully suppressed emotions: two couples who on some level want to scream at each other instead forcing themselves to do the right thing in the hope it’ll bring some sort of peace.
When it’s good it’s good, but I had issues.
The distracting bookend characters, for starters.
And while clearly it is not unreasonable to tell American stories on a British stage, there were moments of preachiness vis a vis gun control that did feel a bit ‘well who are you talking to here exactly?’ Are we getting this because Kranz couldn’t get it staged in the US?
Finally, the elephant in the room is James Graham’s recent Olivier-winning play Punch. The plot isn’t identical to Mass. But his Nottingham-set restorative justice drama about a killer confronting his victim’s parents is undoubtedly in the same ballpark, and it’s simply a stronger, more culturally relevant play.
Mass is powerful stuff, but its devastating peaks can’t entirely offset some major frustrations.
