Like many Americans, Sam (Michelle Fox) and John (Mark Quartley) are turned on by guns. But they’re *really* turned on. They take their arsenal to bed with them – or at least they do until John accidentally shoots Sam in the arm. It’s only a flesh wound, but it prompts a serious rethink of their love life. They go clean: but they’re unhappy and frustrated. He becomes uptight, her erratic, There is no banging in any sense of the word. But then Sam’s brother Scotty (Nima Taleghani) shows up one day clutching his stash of firearms; John demands he put them in a lockup, but the temptation is there. Meanwhile, Sam, haunted by her abduction as a child, is glued to the news, obsessed by the disappearance of a local girl the same age she was when she was taken.
What is US playwright Sarah Kosar’s play really about? It’s difficult to tell, exactly. The Yard’s house directing style of throw-everything-at-it-and-see-what-sticks paid off big time recently with its revival of ‘The Crucible’, but I’m really not convinced it does new writing a lot of favours. Sara Joyce’s production is all short, sexy blackout scenes, cast members writhing tautly in neon clothes while an eerie cover of ‘American Pie’ oozes out of the PA, enormous, distorted projected recordings of news reports, and Jasmine Swan’s cool set, a deconstructed home with a few tricks built into it, surrounded by a junk-filled pond.
It isn’t, in fact, the Yard at its most excessive, but the play feels overwhelmed. Is ‘Armadillo’ about, you know, guns? Or is it about a wider, prurient fascination with violence that speaks more closely to an audience unlikely to own firearms? Or even an allegory for the American opioid crisis? (The trio’s odd behaviour would be largely explicable if you traded their firearm addiction for a narcotics habit). Is it about sex? Gendered violence? Domestic abuse? I don’t think Kosar – who had a fringe hit with the surreal ‘Mumburger’ – owes us a crystal clear message. But it is another new play at this theatre where the most lasting impression is how it looked: I don’t really have a problem with that, but for an unabashedly leftfield theatre, it does feel like you pretty much know what you’re going to get at the Yard these days.