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Neil LaBute does not appear to have much hope for humanity. It is not just that the US playwright’s characters in this trio of short plays are cruel and uncaring, but that their total lack of remorse flattens the interest of their stories. LaBute is pinned as a provocateur, but his trilogy doesn’t feel risky so much as misanthropically sour.
Best known for In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things, LaBute has 10 plays presented in three chapters in America the Beautiful, a split-venue UK premiere staged between the King’s Head and Greenwich theatre.
Though his writing aims for savagery, this trio – previously staged in the US – leave little more than a faint mark. In Hate Crime, two men having an affair (Liam Jedele and Borris Anthony York) poorly plan the murder of one of their fiances for the life insurance payout. York watches on worriedly as Jedele’s character seethes and paces, exorcising his internalised homophobia by detailing exactly how he will beat up another man for his queerness. LaBute’s over-egged and easily diverted dialogue is as unsubtle as the men’s plan, while James Haddrell’s direction gives the actors a lot of nail-nibbling to be getting on with on Jana Lakatos’s boxy, hard-edged set.
York does a good job switching to the role of a broken soldier for the monologue Kandahar. A man trained for violence, his uniform is neat and his posture perfect as he confesses to a murderous rampage. Like both characters in Hate Crime, he is devoid of guilt, pointing all blame – for his crime, for most crimes – at his wife, or women in general. These are bitter men hardened against the world. Masculinity in America, LaBute says as he repeatedly knocks our heads against the wall, is not in a good way.
In the third play, The Possible, the playwright seems to ease up. Maya-Nika Bewley and Anna María have cheek and chemistry as a woman and her would-be seducer. The pair do well to keep up the energy even as the writing runs out of heat, but this play is refreshingly more interested in the strangeness of humanity than in our far blander tendency for violence.
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America the Beautiful: Chapter 1 is at King’s Head theatre, London, until 14 March. Chapter 2 is at King’s Head, 16-21 March. Chapter 3 is at Greenwich theatre, London, 31 March-4 April.
