Joshua McElroy as Gary (pictured) in Tooth & Sinew’s Osama the Hero. Image via Tooth & Sinew.
Osama the Hero is a modern day witch hunt set in a London housing estate riddled with unsavoury types. Gary (Joshua McElroy), a 17 year old weirdo, thinks nothing of using the world’s most infamous terrorist as the subject of his school presentation on heroism. Francis and Louise (Tel Benjamin and Nicole Wineberg), are siblings who plot to take care of Gary. Around the corner Mark (Lynden Jones) and Mandy (Poppy Lynch), a paedophile and a schoolgirl are drawn into the action.
At the heart of Dennis Kelly’s 2005 play is a very chilling question about what evil lurks inside each and every one of us. However, the play is problematic. It’s long and repetitive, inconsistencies are many, so it would take a pretty exceptional production to overcome this play’s inherent flaws. Sadly, Tooth & Sinew is not that company. It was an ambitious undertaking for a relatively fresh group, and the fact that they did not manage to land it hints at an over-reliance on shock tactics.
The first warning sign came in the form of a bad East London accent. This is not the first time I’ve said this, and will likely not be the last: unless the accent is perfectly executed, it will do more harm than good. These accents were far from convincing and it’s likely that all performances suffered as a result of them. Moreover, why the desperate need to cling to the play’s English roots? The story is just as relevant to Australian society, and setting the play in a faraway country does a disservice to the idea that this could happen to any one of us.
Performances were over-exaggerated, lacking nuance and the ebb and flow necessary to sustain an audience for 80 minutes without intermission. Read: there was a lot of shouting. From start to end, it didn’t stop. Ask any sound designer and they will tell you that audiences will reactively tune out sustained loud noises, and hence shouting is something that is effective in short bursts only. Despite this, Benjamin has his moments, and perhaps with a more subtle and restrained direction, he could really be something. Jones, as the most experienced performer onstage, gives a little respite. Lynch is more suited to the comic role than the dramatic.
This play throws you into the action fast and deep, and it can be quite confusing trying to work out who all the characters are and what the context of the world is. Visual elements of blocking, production design and lighting should all have been able to create that context, but didn’t. There was no separation of space between the Mark character and the Francis and Louise characters, leading me to believe for the first half of the play, that they were all living under the same roof and Mark was their child, whilst Francis and Louise were a couple instead of siblings (because who walks around in a bra while talking to their brother as Wineberg does in the first scene?). An ill-conceived floodlight at one point had the adverse effect of cutting off the audiences sightline to the action, a sightline that was already limited on the tiny KXT stage.
The key to making this play work resides in creating believable empathetic villains whom we identify with, forcing us to confront the horror of what we might capable of. So it follows, the failure of this production lies in them getting it all backwards – the empathy lies with the victim, and the villains are completely un-empathetic. Some of these problems lie in the writing, but this production makes no effort to rectify those problems, choosing instead to focus on the shock violence factor at the expense of character development. Kudos for effort, but ultimately this production has rendered the play meaningless.
Rating: 1 star out of ​5
Osama the Hero
A Tooth & Sinew Theatre production
Written by Dennis Kelly
Directed by Richard Hilliar
Lighting Design: Sian James-Holland
Set Design: Courtney Westbrook
Sound Design: Tegan Nicholls
Stage Manager: Ben Hinchley
Featuring Tel Benjamin, Lynden Jones, Poppy Lynch, Joshua McElroy and Nicole Wineberg
King’s Cross Theatre, King’s Cross
21 January – 4 February 2017
www.kingsxtheatre.com
