Attempting Closure

“No church would memorialise Haydn.”

Linda

It was James Graham’s play Punch which made such an impact on the subject of restorative justice, set in Nottingham, the book written by the man who had killed an innocent bystander. At the Donmar Warehouse comes the subject of Fran Kranz’s Indie film of 2021. We Know it’s a meeting in an Episcopal Church Hall but we are 30 minutes into the play before we are told its subject, when Gail says, “Your son killed my son!”

Some years before, Richard (a severe Paul Hilton) and Linda (Monica Dolan)’s 16 year old son Haydn has shot dead ten members of his high school, from a class he had nothing to do with, and then shot himself in the school library. There have been numerous investigations and inquiries following on from the shooting over several years.

Jay (Adeel Akbar) and his wife Gail (Lyndsey Marshal) whose son Evan was killed, have asked to sit down with Haydn’s parents to understand more about what happened. This has been facilitated by Kendra (Rochelle Rose) a negotiator and Judy (Susie Trayling) in charge of the hall, who has a son Brandon (Amari Bacchus).

Linda has arrived with a bunch of flowers for Gail and some mementoes showing a side of Haydn softer than the memories of his playing “Call of Duty”, a one person shooter computer game. They search for explanations: at 15, Haydn was diagnosed with mental health conditions, anti-social personality disorder and bi-polarity. However, he only expressed ideas of suicide, not harming others. We learn that Linda and Richard’s marriage has ended since the shooting but without any obvious acrimony.

There are admirable performances all round. We feel the hurt of both mothers and of Jay, Evan’s father. Richard remains more detached anxious to get to his next meeting and we feel his parenting of Haydnn was more distant. Carrie Cracknell directs well and the rotating set avoids the problem as to how to see the faces of four sitting across a table from each other. The striped lighting from the spaces in the corridor wall above shines into the space beneath. The set is functional but the lighting enhances it.

I felt ill at ease with this play. There was something about the ending which unsettled me by its complacency. I was disturbed by this meeting going ahead without a mediator there closely observing to keep everyone safe. Kendra was sitting in her car outside. We got the impression that Brandon, although not in the room, had heard everything and that he might have been a student at the school where the shooting took place.

Around the time that the new South Africa was carrying out its Truth and Reconciliation programme, there were several plays to do with this kind of meeting between those hurt and those who had done the hurting. I remember in 2017 one at The Finborough called Late Company by Canadian Jordan Tannahill about a dinner between the parents of a boy who had committed suicide after being bullied at school and the bullying child and his parents. This Finborough play was very well done and had a suitably ambiguous ending.

I spent some of the MASS performance thinking about the play yet to be written: a similar meeting between the parents of Axel Rudakubana and the parents of seven year old Elsie Dot, six year old Bebe and nine year old Alice and the many others who, whilst not dying, suffered horrific injuries. This was not a case where we could be smug about our own gun laws.