We've all been there: munching dinner on the sofa while distant atrocities are played out on television.
The status of others' barbarism as virtual entertainment is a troubling one in the cosseted West, and Chris Thorpe certainly provides salutary food for thought on this unsettling subject.
His play Static is a couple of unflinching monologues, delivered in tandem from three immaculate squares of snow-like salt. One is about a cocky young man returning from work to eat dinner and watch telly. The other is about a Kosovar woman waiting her turn to be shot in the back of the head.
As the man, Jon Spooner is averagely self-absorbed, hatching idle masturbation fantasies on public transport. The first sting in his tale comes when his description of shopping in an odourless supermarket is set against the scent of "growing things" in the woodland selected as the terminus for Clare Duffy's Kosovar woman. The title of the play refers to the stasis of the man's anaesthetic routines and the numbing effect of the horror experienced by the woman. But Static also has a more troubling implication - suggesting a nastily settled synergy between couch potato and human sacrifice.
Clare Duffy is also the writer of the more whimsical companion piece for Leeds's Unlimited Theatre, Clean. It lacks Thorpe's rigour and craftsmanship. It's a new take on the tale of the French maids who murdered their employers in 1933 and inspired Jean Genet's most famous play. Here, Duffy's two psychotic sisters are living in a mutually sustained fantasy world with its own private games and language. You know the sisters have done something wicked, but never know exactly what.
Extrapolating from their regressive rivalry, the suggestion is that childish indolence is the gateway to murderous excess. However this is not an idea set out with anything like the clinical technique that Thorpe displays in Static.
Static
