In a parched cornfield in the Southern States, the most famous outlaw couple in history sit and wait– ostensibly for the next robbery, in reality for the end.
There’s more than a dash of ‘Godot’ to this promising play from young Bristolian company Fairground. Ill at ease and listlessly pecking at each other, Bonnie Parker and Clive Barrow may already be in purgatory, with a series of eerie monologues suggesting that they are acquainted with the manner of their demises.
Adam Peck’s script has a sparse, elegiac beauty that’s matched by Chris Gylee’s set, and Catherine McKinnon and Eoin Slattery are persuasively bittersweet as the unravelling lovers.
Yet there’s little engagement with their crime. We don’t need them to be monsters, but surely it must be plausible – or at least meaningful – that they committed a string of murders. The nervy banality of their current situation is affecting, but Peck’s script has so little to say about their crimes that one wonders why he chose them as his subject.