You Are the Blood

A serial killer’s murder of seven young women haunts his family.  David Boden, the killer (Andrew Blackman), is incarcerated for life.  His daughter, would-be stand-up comic Shelby (Jessica Stanley), and stay-at-home son Ben (James Cerché) are frightened by and obsessed with their father: are they tainted?  Is he in their blood?  Shelby can reel off the names of the victims.  Boden’s now alcoholic wife Linda (Vivienne Powell) can’t help loving the man Boden was – or she thought he was – before…  But now, suddenly, Boden is back in the news, on television everywhere.  Flaky ‘performance artist’ Sylvia (Jem Nicholas), who has a habit of falling in love with gaoled killers, is now ‘in love’ with Boden.  They intend to marry and meanwhile they exchange intimate and poetic letters.  (The eroticism we might expect is rather coy and muted.)

Thus the promising set-up of this play, the vehicle for many ideas – although not all of them, perhaps, are dramatised.  As we’ve come to expect, director Peter Blackburn elicits natural performances from his cast.  The bond between Shelby and Ben is convincing brother-sister stuff.  The conflict between Shelby and her mother rings true.  The faux ‘friendship’ that develops between Shelby and Sylvia is suitably coloured with a hidden sneer under fascination on one side and naïve self-absorption on the other.  But this fine cast is for long stretches as if at half pressure and their problem, really, is the text: You Are the Blood, although ‘interesting’ and with some incisive, tough dialogue, is not a great play.  It’s a play in which, unfortunately, the playwright’s reach seems to exceed her grasp. 

After all, the antagonist is in a high security gaol - forever.  In practical terms, he is harmless – unless his family and new ‘girlfriend’ choose to be harmed and even then, the harm is, must be, internal.  That situation is immediately constraining and requires a great deal of talking about the past, about feelings and about him, the killer who is also the father and husband and dream lover.

Mr Blackman’s David initially stands on a platform above the action (the low-rent design is by Abbie-Lea Hough), looking for all the world like a waxwork in a ‘spooky’ museum and burdened with some portentous monologues about his crimes and, later, the letters he writes to Sylvia.  It’s something of a struggle to listen to this stuff, but what is Mr Blackman supposed to do with it?  Jessica Stanley, a fine actor, is perky but as Shelby frustratingly low-key.  Is she really haunted by the questions the text proposes?  Do we care about Shelby? 

Supposedly, the characters – apart from the serial killer - are ‘likeable’ and kind of funny and draw us in.  But what I heard was a great deal of not very well disguised exposition, couched in the dialogue of an average if meandering sit-com.  And as David Mamet said in another context, two characters talking about a third is not drama.  Well, there’s a great deal here of two – or three – characters talking about another.  

Then, with the character of Sylvia, playwright Ashley Rose Wellman wants to have it both ways.  When Shelby and Ben – incognito – drop in on one of Sylvia’s performance pieces, it is so wince-makingly bad (satire, I suppose, of a bête noir of the playwright’s) that it takes all of Jem Nicholas’ skill, charm and beauty to recover.  But she does recover and to our surprise the airhead takes the play, emotionally at least, away from Shelby.

Only in the second half do we get three scenes of real drama.  You might say that we have been well-prepared for them, but it’s also because they are scenes of genuine interaction – conflict - with the wants and needs of the characters made clear and visceral in text and performance.  That is to say that in these scenes the text provides the opportunity for performance. 

Now Mr Blackman, down from his perch, makes his David genuinely, psychopathically menacing in his interactions with Sylvia and, climactically, with Shelby.  The intractable controlling nature of the serial killer’s self-righteousness is demonstrated – not told – and mixed with chilling self-serving sentimentality.  Now we see why his children have lived with the fear of being like him.  Now we are held, and the tension comes from an overwhelming need for the women finally to escapehim.

For me, the best piece of performance of the evening is (spoiler alert) when Ms Nicholas’ silly, shallow, deluded Sylvia is finally, for the first time, in the same room as her supposed ‘lover’ – and she shrinks, but she saves herself, her delusions fall away.  You can see them fall away and lie in sad tatters at her feet.  Subsequently –as a clear result – and ironically, she rushes to her only ‘friend’, Shelby, and has desperate need to connect with young Ben (or anybody ‘normal’) - a development that is only momentarily surprising. 

Michael Brindley