FringeReview UK 2024
Blood On Your Hands
Patch Plays
Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Southwark Playhouse Borough Little Studio
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
There’s good reason for The Araby Bazaar’s very impressive sound to be one of the furies driving Grace Joy Howarth’s Blood On Your Hands at Southwark’s Borough Little Studio directed by Anastasia Bunce for Patch Plays till February 3rd.
Along with Elizabeth Skellett’s truly impressive lighting and some of Alex Powell’s video design, this play of trauma local and global can signify a great deal.
A potentially terrific play, Blood On Your Hands needs to develop some key relationships – primarily Eden and Dan’s – and develop the set. Running at 90 minutes, down from its initial 100, it could add another ten and prove more telling, possibly outstanding. The themes, acting and arc of this deserve it.
Directed by Anastasia Bunce, Set Designer Ahmet Buyukcinar, Associate Set Designer Hazel Poole Zane, Costume Designer Leah Kelly, Lighting Designer Abraham Walking-Lea, Associate Lighting Designer Elizabeth Skellett, Video Design Alex Powell, Sound The Araby Bazaar and with Movement Director Tessa Guerrero.
Communications and Partnerships Norina Maniscalco, Voice Coach David Jarzen, Producers Jake Curran-Pike Grace Joy Howarth and Anastasia Bunce
Associate Set Designer Bethany Faith Nais, Assistant Producer UU Zhang, Assistant Directors Lucy Corley and Alex Kampfner, Stage Manager Meghan Bartual Smyth, ASM Kiara Atkinson, Associate Sound Design Flick Isaac-Chilton,
Marketing Assistant Eleanore Jenks, Press David Burns PR, Poster Design, Mohammed Patel, Graphic Design Bibi Lucille, Rehearsal Photographer Stuart Bunce.
Till February 3rd
Review
There’s good reason for The Araby Bazaar’s very impressive sound to be one of the furies driving Grace Joy Howarth’s Blood On Your Hands at Southwark’s Borough Little Studio directed by Anastasia Bunce for Patch Plays till February 3rd.
Along with Elizabeth Skellett’s truly impressive lighting and some of Alex Powell’s video design, this play of trauma local and global can signify a great deal. Set in a meat-packing factory with a ‘kill floor’, a strikingly unusual camaraderie then friendship develops between hopeless mouthy local Dan (Phillip John Jones), and Kostyantyn (Shannon Smith).
Dan’s stuck having done community service for minor dealing, can only get this job and lives with his mother. Kostyantyn’s a Ukrainian veterinary surgeon and migrant to the UK, trying desperately for a better life for his family.
That’s Nina (Kateryna Hryhorenko) now expecting twins on top of another child. We often sashay backwards in time: to their first meeting on her farm, and his pretence now that he’s working as a vet, not a kill-floor slaughterer of animals he once protected. Video interjections flash up the two chilly February weeks, just before the 2022 Ukraine invasion.
There’s also a reverse chemistry between and Dan and his ex-girlfriend Eden (Liv Jekyll) now an animal rights activist who’d been switched on by the blood on Dan’s hands, his tales of slaughter: five years on they’re alienated and she’s now taunting him along with others multi-roling as activists.
There’s much multi-roling. The cramped conditions Kostyantyn lives in for instance, eight to a room, is vividly depicted in its squabbles and squalor. Tessa Guerrero’s movement direction adds a kinetic layer of physicality and danger.
In one striking tableau, the two couples set in two separate pasts make a foursome in a mini-Ayckbourn-esque ballet of simultaneous picnicking: literally a quartet on a rug with overlapping dialogue. This suggests just what stagecraft Howarth’s capable of and it really promises.
Elsewhere The Man (Jordan El-Balawi) oversees the factory with a chill of privilege, as well as playing taunting ex-schoolmate Damien and Eden’s fellow-activist Callum. The Man and Damien exude a different kind of corporate hateur: callous management on the one hand, icy bonhomie barely disguising sneers from Damien in a pub scene.
It’s clear Dan was the bright popular boy. He reflects it’s the popular ones who never succeed: a shorthand for humanity and capitalist greed. El-Balawi’s an excellent foil in his scenes.
Smith smoulders his way through stress and anxiety (shout-out to voice coach David Jarzen). As Nina grows more desperate and Kostyantyn keeps putting her off, his excuses and slippages tell on him. But he’s older than Dan, tougher than he seems, wiser. Jones with his apologetic motormouth persona is electrifying – and the Smith/Jones partnership sizzles with a fire showing how this whole play might explode.
Jones brings Dan’s wry self-awareness, the world of blood and moisturiser (and we learn touchingly how he discovers its efficacy in a tiny moment of connection). 25, he’s now literally up the food chain processing not killing after five years; should be inured.
There’s some striking set design by Ahmet Buyukcinar, particularly use of a transparent sheet which gets slashed and bloodied, as well as the floor. The trouble is it’s one-dimensional: only those directly ahead get full benefit. It might be curved or flapped. In this guise it briefly serves as a window of communication, with literally blood between husband and wife.
The white set, with upstage lockers and table for the factory, reeks of potential though lacks the heft of the video design: sometimes strikingly used, sometimes a bit clunky (do we need the newsreels even twice?).
It’s Abraham Walkling Lea’s impressive lighting along with The Araby Bazaar’s sound, and Smith’s and Jones’ acting, that really scores; along with scenes involving Hryhorenko. El-Balawi is excellent but Jekyll, superb as Eden and a no-nonsense-but-flirty barmaid is seriously under-used.
A single scene with Eden on a laptop growing angrier is shorthand for her soul. It’s not enough. At 90 minutes we want to know more about her, why she cares, her sudden decisions. There’s a lot more to unearth with Eden and Dan and a more telling punch from her at the end is needed. Jekyll could easily deliver this.
A potentially terrific play, Blood On Your Hands needs to develop some key relationships – primarily Eden and Dan’s – and develop the set. Running at 90 minutes, down from its initial 100, it could add another ten and prove more telling, possibly outstanding. The themes, acting and arc of this deserve it.
