DAILY MAIL
19.9.90
John Marriott
Blessed by David Spencer's lean script which ensures that anger
bounces off
the walls of this tiny venue with full force, this impressive
piece links family
break-up to social unrest, and provides meaty roles for an excellent
cast.
Centering on the uneasy introspection of Danny (Sean Bean), who
makes a trip
back to Yorkshire to grapple with his family background, "Killing
the Cat" also
draws in a vivid portrait of a weak, blustering father (Henry
Stamper) and
flashes back to a happy childhood which lasted until love was
broken into tiny
pieces.
Sean Bean holds the centre well as Angry Young Danny, veering
convincingly
from volcanic rage and biting cynicism, to weepy sensitivity and
all-out
kindness. Henry Stamper provides a visceral treat as a father
trapped by his
own insecurity.
Kate McLoughlin and Sally Rogers offer confident support as Danny's
two
sisters, while Valerie Lilley, as the mother, fixes your gaze
with her descent
toward mental illness.
This harrowing scenario of alienation and lost love is thankfully
punctured
by bouts of earthy humour. The acting is so electric the cast
almost sits in
your lap.
TIME OUT
5.9.90
James Christopher
David Spencer's award winning play, full of tense, inarticulate
aggression,
examines the corrosive legacy of sexual abuse as seen through
the eyes of a
young playwright, Danny, whose almost perverse determination to
exhume his
working-class family's murky past rubs abrasively against their
wishes. If the
main dynamic is Danny's quest for the root of his father Sam's
shadowy, drink-
twisted guilt - namely Sam's interference with his sister Shelagh
(Sally Rogers)
- it is deliberately obscured by what Danny thinks happened (the
content of his
play), what he has been told happened, what he remembers happening
and what he
imagines to have happened.
The action shuttles between the '70's and the present day on Tom
Conway's
cluttered set; street lamps, dustbins and the expedient post-pub
trappings of
armchair and TV evoke on the one hand council-estate familiarity
and suggest on
the other the emotional and circumstantial impoverishment of the
protagonists'
lives. It's a surreal arena dominated by Henry Stamper's ebullient
Dubliner,
Sam, whose genuine, unaffected affection for Young Danny (Dominic
Kinnaird) and
the older, wiser version (Sean Bean) is strongly contrasted to
the harsh
intensity Danny employs to nail his father to the past to punish
him almost in
order to forgive him. It's the arrogance of a playwright and the
festering hurt
of wronged youth, but crucially, the recognition on Danny's part
that he is
vulnerable to the same sin. In all, a demanding, complex work
which Sue
Dunderdale directs with respect and sensitivity, exacting powerful
performances
from the Soho Theatre Company.
THE TIMES
31.8.90
Harry Eyres
David Spencer has written a play about the noxious effects of
child abuse,
which is notable for the absence of campaigning rhetoric and accusing
fingers,
and in which the social services are never mentioned. Perhaps
it would be more
accurate to say that he is concerned with the breakdown of proper
channels of
communication, which includes love, within a family - a breakdown
which
incestuous love freezes and enforces rather than resolves. The
effect in this
fine production directed by Sue Dunderdale has something of the
dark intensity
of O'Neill (no accident that this is a family of Irish origin,
living in West
Yorkshire) and also his structural awkwardness.
In Shimon Castiel's design, the Theatre Upstairs stage is arranged
lengthways, giving it an uncommon breadth, to form a dingy, basement-like
space
full not only of bicycles, dustbins, television and cat food but
also of the
impediments of the past. This allows the play to develop simultaneously
at
different levels of time.
Two of these are defined by the ages of the two actors playing
Danny, the son
of the family who (in the present) has come back up north as an
unemployed
writer to confront his and his family's past. This Danny is taken
with raw
energy, anger and desperation by Sean Bean. He also appears as
a boy of 14,
played with quiet sensitivity by Dominic Kinnaird. Danny is the
conscience and
recording angel of the family; the fact that he has written a
book called
Killing the Cat, which reveals the family's dark secrets, enables
other
characters reading from it to speak what they would not normally
say.
At the centre of the action is Danny's father Sam, an immigrant
Irish factory
worker imbued with charm, dignity and rich vowels by Henry Stamper.
Behind the
charm lies an orphanage upbringing, violence, and a feeling that
drink excuses
most things but not the stealthy abuse of his daughter Shelagh;
he drinks to
erase the guilt.
Spencer is stronger on his male characters than on the female
ones who are
the obvious victims. The sisters Kathy (Kate McLoughlin) and Shelagh
(Sally
Rogers) react much more stoically than Danny, accepting that life
must continue,
though the bricked-up room seems more and more like a prison.
Their mother Joan
(Valerie Lilley) is seen at one point in catatonic despair, then
walks out
without comment.
LISTENER
8.9.90
Matt Wolf
What increasingly seems to be the Royal Court's house style -
short, sharp
plays written in jagged, non-naturalistic stabs - is reinvigorated
in David
Spencer's "Killing the Cat" (Theatre Upstairs), the
Soho Theatre Company
offering that won this year's Verity Bargate award. Spencer lives
in Berlin,
but his play returns him to the terrain of his earlier works,
"Releevo" and
"Space": working class Yorkshire and families living
in a crisis that they can
barely articulate. His authorial alter ego, a writer named Danny
(Sean Bean),
makes his need to comprehend itself a theme of the play, as the
various
incidents from his turbulent childhood and adolescence are interlaced
with
excerpts from the book, Killing the Cat, which we see him offering
up to sister
Shelagh (Sally Rogers) for approval.
"Maybe I'll write a comedy," Danny tells his boozing
father Sam (Henry
Stamper) at the end, in a curtain line that nicely avoids any
possible
melodrama. And yet the mordant sarcasm of the remark is inescapable
in the
light of what the play unfolds - a life marked by cycles of violence,
pain and
repression, in which the sins of the swaggering Irish father seem
inevitably to
be visited on his brooding and introspective Yorkshire son.
Uniting all the characters is a need for "the way out",
as Danny's other
sister, Kathy (Kate McLoughlin), puts it. While Danny finds a
catharsis of
sorts in prose, Sam seeks his escape route in drink, shutting
out the memory of
prior incestuous episodes with Shelagh which Danny, discovering
these belatedly,
calls on him to confront. Relegated to the sidelines is Danny's
divorcee
mother, Joan (Valerie Lilley), a woman condemned by her own inarticulacy
to want
from life one thing which she couldn't name, "so she couldn't
ask for it."
Sufficiently expressive is the ashen-faced, wide-eyed Lilley that
the part seems
even more disappointingly underwritten.
Sue Dunderdale's direction makes adroit use of every aspect of
the small
Court studio, as the six actors (Danny is in fact shown as two
selves, Bean's
questing adult and Dominic Kinnaird's troubled child) lay bare
a shared history
of unvoiced wishes and vague hopes, some of which, Spencer implies,
may yet be
answered. On a hot night punctuated by thunder showers outside,
this exemplary
company generated that unusually electric heat which comes from
witnessing a
relatively unknown playwright on the verge of a breakthrough.
WHAT'S ON
5.9.90
Dale Arden
"Killing the Cat" opens with a fragmented sequence of
moments from a family's
history, past and present. Although the links between the fragments
at first
seem obscure, each moment has perfect emotional clarity. The effect
is
kaleidoscopic, as little shards of atmosphere, each one razor
sharp at the
edges, gradually begin to resolve themselves into a pattern.
In a decaying house that was once the family home, Danny prowls
around
sniffing out the past like a bloodhound. If the past won't deliver
itself into
his hands, he'll hunt it down.
Danny's mother used to tell him "You're alright son."
but that was before she
went through the psychiatric mill, before they "plugged her
into the national
grid system". She wasn't mad, she was just "fatigued
with sadness". Danny's
sister Shelagh once thought that the things her father made her
do were
"alright", because if it's your Dad and he tells you
it's alright, it must be.
Lost in an endless loop of actions, reactions and repetitions,
Danny can't
see a way of getting clear of any of it. "I'm not alright
and I tell you I'm
not alright." Sociologically speaking everyone in "Killing
the Cat" is a victim
of some kind; but it's not a play about passivity and victimisation,
it's about
loving, being sad and getting on with it. The characters are dynamic,
if
confused, participants in their own lives.
The play received the 1990 Verity Bargate Award, and quite right
too. David
Spencer's writing is poetic, on the ball and very much alive.
He manages to
play out a thread of real humour in the grimmest situations while
avoiding the
pit of saccharin that lurks around the "make 'em laugh, make
'em cry" school of
drama. This production by the Soho Theatre company is beautifully
directed (by
Sue Dunderdale) and the cast of six are universally excellent.
Highly
recommended.
The Independent (London)
September 13, 1990, Thursday
By GEORGINA BROWN
David Spencer's Killing
the Cat explores the repercussions for a working-class family
when the son writes a novel exposing his father's sexual abuse
of his daughter. It is
Spencer's second winner of the Verity Bargate Award for new writers
and an exceptional
piece - dense, demanding and boldly conceived, and here given
a searing production by
Sue Dunderdale and a superb cast.
Danny (Sean Bean at his
most transfixing) and his sister Sheilagh (played with raw
emotion by Sally Rogers) hate their father, Sam, for what he has
done to Sheilagh; but
they love him because he is their father. Spencer allows his characters
and their
relationships to be infinitely complex, riddled with plausible
ambiguities and
contradictory emotions, and as a result they are frighteningly
real. It's the
children's inability (or perhaps determined refusal) to hate their
father that
suspends our moral judgement of him. A scene in which Sam sits
mindlessly watching
a train set go round and round provides one of many details through
which Spencer
invites our sympathy for him - his childhood in an orphanage,
the hatred Irish
immigrants face, his wife's coldness. Alan Devlin gives a superlatively
horrible
performance as Sam, proud, pugnacious and pissed, unquestioningly
sentimental about
his kids and himself and stone-deaf to criticism.
With almost cinematic fluency,
the play slips backwards and forwards in time and place.
The clever, gentle child (Dominic Kinnaird) who hero-worshipped
his father is seen in
sharp juxtaposition with the cynical adult he has become, a writer
full of rage on
behalf of his sister. The catharsis he experiences in writing
about the abuse
(''I was born with too many feelings. If I didn't find anywhere
to put them, I'd
die of them'') is for Sheilagh a second invasion , which raises
pertinent questions
about a writer's right to feed on other people's lives.
It is hard to pin down the
narrative any more precisely than the play's oblique title.
This might refer to a flashback scene in which a pet cat has been
run over and Sam
puts it out of its misery, an act that always haunted Danny. Or
it might refer to
the fact that Danny could wreak vengeance on his father by killing
the cat Sam is
besotted with. But the validity of each individual's version of
reality and the
inevitably imperfect understanding of another's point of view
are exactly those
areas that Spencer is exploring. The imaginative power of his
play lies in its
insistence that we pay attention.