The Glory Of Living

10 April 2012

There are just a few moments of violence and reckless sexual assault in Rebecca Gilman's ironically entitled The Glory of Living. For Gilman's account of a young psychopath and his enthralled, teenage moll murderously travelling through America's Deep South, does not stoop to cheap thrills. Yet her play struck me as one of the most horrifying to emerge from a new American dramatist this decade. In following the trail and trials of her unnatural killers, Gilman avoids playing psychotherapist to a sick nation, treating it for urges to kill with guns, rape women and torture gays.

The play fascinates through its elucidating view of Lisa, a trailer-park teenager in Tennessee. As rivetingly conceived by Gilman and played by Monica Dolan, this bejeaned, 15-year-old communicates glum blankness. Her mother services men in the caravan while Lisa sits around in a life-daze, from which strong feeling has gone. Yet that she should drift off into marriage and motherhood with Tony Curran's scarey Clint, a pony-tailed rapist prone to tantrums, who easily persuades her to shoot his rape victims, needs some justifying.

Gilman, an eerily mature 22-year-old, identifies Lisa as a symptom of a damaged, female low-tier America, for whom masochism and the vice of immorally standing by your man becomes the only way, even when you more fear than love him. So, in cheap motel rooms where Clint hauls a hand-cuffed girl from her stoned slump on the floor, or almost suffocates another, Lisa acts as both accomplice and opponent. Questioned by the bemused detective and lawyer, vainly trying to under-stand what prompted her murderous acts, Dolan's oddly smiling, impenitent Lisa retreats into the self she neither values nor will save.

Kathryn Hunter's inappropriately staged production allows none of the intimacy, close-focus and claustrophobia that the play's 14 scenes in cheap motel rooms and police interrogation centres require. Liz Cooke's design, with its opulent wooden-floored spaciousness and bare, open spaces, dissipates tension and mood. But Gilman masters a raw, terse Deep South diction in which the actors revel. And the becalmed menace of Curran's sexy Clint draws Miss Dolan's astonishing Lisa into an extended, dramatic dance of death.

The Glory Of Living

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