If you’re good at suspending disbelief, and find threats and guns entertaining, you’ll probably quite enjoy Killer Joe. When a Texan trailer park family engages a contract killer to kill their ex-wife/ mother for the insurance money, you just know they’re asking for trouble.

You even know what kind of trouble they’re asking for; Joe ain’t got his nickname for his fishing, y’all. Cheap thrills are the goals of this show rather than believable characters or a plausible plot with a point to make. The relatively brief glimpses of nudity and violence are both voyeuristic and disturbing – a cleverly uneasy mix. They don’t feel gratuitous – but the white-trash stereotypes do. [More]
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The naturalism is in your face and mixed with an almost absurdist storyline. The characters are superbly played! I’m thinking perhaps Harold Pinter is not dead, perhaps he has moved to America and changed his name to Tracy Letts! On top of that the style is realised perfectly through every facet of the production. These guys are real theatre badasses: they even smoke on stage!

The production standards totally blew me away! A TV that goes on and off (and plays content appropriate to the situation), the lighting, the sound effects and the way it was encased in a fake ceiling made it the first show I’ve been to at The Basement (nee Silo, nee Jeffery James Theatre) in which one is not acutely aware of the low ceiling in that space.

The setting is the inside of a caravan, Southern USA, somewhere in Texas.  Chris (Charlie McDermott) returns to the caravan of his father Ancel (Craig Hall) after being kicked out of his mother’s house. He needs cash to pay back a large debt owes to some fairly dodgy sounding characters.

Right from the get go the acting is fantastic, the accents are flawless and I feel as though I am really getting a good glimpse of a culture totally different from my own, and of a stunningly beautiful half naked woman – Chris’s stepmother – Sharla (Sara Wiseman).

You get to see almost everyone at least partially in the nick and they are all super hot. The superb acting makes it a bargain at twice the ticket price!

Chris has come to discuss something of a delicate nature with his Dad – his mother’s life insurance policy. We never see the unfortunate woman but it is pretty clear she’s not well loved by any one in the play. The challange for Chris is to convince his Dad to inlist the help of "Killer Joe" (Colin Moy) in order to do away with "mom" and take the cash for the good of the family – including Dottie (Beth Allen) who is Ansel’s simpleton daughter.

That’s all I’ll reveal about the story. If you want to see how it all pans out you’ll have to go and see the show, and I strongly recommend you do!

It is heavily supported by a crew that it makes the overall production so slick that I think future audiences are in for a real treat! The dialogue is snappy, real and at times hillarious. When there are moments of silence we get to really appreciate them because of this.

However, there is something that bothers me and I don’t know if it’s the play, the interpretation or the fact that the opening night audience, it would seem, refuses to see the play any other way than as a violent absudist comedy.  Well who am I to argue with them? They certainly have had a fabulous time and lots of laughter … but I am looking for something more sinister, there has been such promise and such a building of tension, then in a final flurry of activity it is suddenly all over!

I don’t know if they are directed this way or not, but the actors break character for the curtain call before the lights have gone down on the last scene – which leaves me feeling quite disturbed and it makes the play feel a little like an acting exercise – diffusing the strength of the performances.

To be completely honest I am left feeling very alone in the room, everyone is cheering and seems over joyed, but I am feeling empty because I am, in an instant, realising that the play – while brillaintly written and performed (in terms of the characterisation and dialogue) – is … well … meaningless. 

Now I am not one of those people that needs to know the meaning of every moment or to have a moral point rammed down my throat at all; I am quite happy to find it in simpler things, even in character itself … But I truly can’t find anything meanful to take away with me and I’m wondering what I have missed.

On the way home it dawns on me that the characters (every one of them) are real gems for any actor, but they don’t really develop throughout the story. In particular the title role "Killer Joe" has some quite massive changes to his life during the play, yet his dialogue stays cool as ever and so does Moy’s performance. I’d like to have seen director (Cameron Rhodes) encourage Moy to let us in on what’s going on for Joe because from what I have seen he appears to be exactly the same guy at the end as he was at the start, and I have a suspicion that his role could be the key to this play meaning something.
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