Killer Joe

By Robert Iles - 17th Oct 2004

When originally produced, Tracey Letts’ Killer Joe was in the vanguard of the in-yer-face theatre movement. The subject, dialogue and presentation left audiences shocked and with a feeling that they had both seen and experienced something really at the edge.

Killer Joe is set in a trailer park. Chris has been thrown out by his mother for violence and comes to stay with his father, his step-mother and his simple sister. We learn that he’s into a violent drug dealer for ,000 and has plotted to have his mother killed for her insurance. His father agrees and they contact a crooked policeman to do the deal. The policeman, Killer Joe, wants money up-front but when they can’t do that he agrees to take Chris’s sister Dottie as ‘a retainer’. The family agree and Killer Joe moves in. When the mother is killed it is discovered that her boyfriend is the beneficiary and has tricked Chris into doing the dead, but the twists continue as we find that Chris’s step-mother is having an affair with the boyfriend and is the ‘mastermind’ behind the whole thing. Over an enforced family dinner we learn that Dottie and Killer Joe are to marry and as Chris tries to stop it a fight ensues during which Dottie grabs a gun and shoots her brother and father ending the play with the gun to Killer Joe’s head as she informs him she is pregnant. As the signs in the foyer warn, this play contains violence, nudity, sexually explicit scenes and gunshots.

So how come this production not only failed to provide shock but actually failed to even connect with the audience? Allan Lidkey as Chris was excellent playing with enormous on-stage energy. Stuart Crossman as the father and Jenny Maddox as Jenny were also most convincing but I couldn’t believe in Killer Joe at all, neither as a twisted soul nor as a killer, nor as a cop indeed, not even as a Texan! Esther Elliott I’m afraid just plain failed to convince.

In the end though I think I lay the problems at director Toby Farrow’s door for failing to extract the characters from the actors and the hopelessness, violence and evil from the text and situation. He seems to have pulled back from the rawness of this play to produce a ‘sanitised’ version for sensitive audiences, you could play this to schools groups without getting a peep of complaint from the parents! Sharla’s first appearance should be in a “sweat-stained tee-shirt that falls above her ass” or why should Chris complain that she “answered the door with her beaver puckered out like it was tryin’ to shake my hand” – what we actually got was Sharla in a long tee-shirt, looking like she’d been awoken from a girlies sleep-over. Killer Joe lacked threat, when he commands Dottie to strip, the scene should be, as Aleks Sierz puts it, “too intimate to watch”, it just wasn’t.

A wasted opportunity to remind us why all modern theatre owes so much to the in-yer-face movement, a timid, behind-a-screen piece of theatre.

Robert Iles