Vernon God Little

Australian-born DBC Pierre won the Booker Prize for his first novel, Vernon God Little, and Tanya Ronder’s recent stage adaptation in London was muchapplauded. Not so for this shapeless New Theatre production.

Vernon is an unlucky, cynical teenager falsely accused of a Texas school massacre and on the run across America and Mexico through a kaleidoscope of madcap characters. The script is a deliciously nasty satire of American small town egocentricities, hypocrites, gun-toting bigots, media manipulators, obese and sexually frustrated bogans consumed in a world where even horror is something to be marketed. Vernon’s near end is on death row waiting for a nation of voters on a TV reality show to decide his execution. His mother seems more concerned about the arrival of her new fridge.

No less than sixteen actors crowd the raked stage of the New leaping from one characterisation to another. It is broad-brushed acting but, amongst the shrieking, some are good. What’s missing in Louise Fischer’s direction is any finesse of focus in the physical staging of Vernon’s journey, any theatrical punctuation through this parade of characters. The bite of the satire, the considerable wit of the text, is lost in the wash and the noise. Welcome harmonised moments when the cast break into well-choreographed snippets of popular songs are the exception. Poor Luke Willing does a noble job as the world-weary young Vernon (a literary relative of Holden in The Catcher in the Rye) as the sometimes incomprehensible narrative swirls around him.

Truth and clarity are the victims as the actors all begin to shout at equal volume.

Martin Portus

Photographs © Bob Seary