Phil Ormrod’s new play, ‘Isaac Came Home from the Mountain’, longlisted for the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, is all about men – about fathers and sons – writ large across society. The title alludes to the ultimate overbearing patriarch: Old Testament God, who basically says to Abraham, ‘You love me? Prove it.’ God might have let Abraham off having to sacrifice his own son at the last minute, but imagine how his son Isaac felt afterwards.
Here, Ormrod tackles the sacrifice of lives on the altar of a binary masculinity divided between ‘strong’ and ‘pussy’.
Bobby Wainwright, who has dropped out of college, is stuck in a rural British town with no job prospects. Kicking out against the very literal authority figure of his father, John, a policeman, he starts working for Mike Scofield, who owns a salvage yard. But his determination to impress his new boss has terrible consequences.
Ormrod’s dialogue catches the groin-kick of continually being told you’re worthless in a world that makes no provision for you other than to tell you to ‘be a man’. Bobby has been thrown on the scrap heap. An impressive Charles Furness stomps around Eleanor Bull’s rusty jumble of a set with tongue-tied frustration.
There’s also good work from Kenny Fullwood as Mike’s son, Chris, who peels back his character’s initial bluster to reveal the damage beneath. He and Furness hit the play’s few gentler notes as they form a sort of friendship.
The play gives us an ugly, grimly hopeless world, one where Mike (portrayed with ominous restraint by Ian Burfield) has taught his own son to flinch in his presence. And as Mike clashes with Guy Porritt’s John, who abuses his power as a policeman to try to humiliate him, you can almost hear the creak of the miserable wheel of male one-upmanship turning.
Carla Kingham’s production has a grungy, kinetic energy and scenes move at a clip. Importantly, the play never seeks to justify Bobby’s actions. But the grim inevitability of their course is also its shortcoming. Characters are fixed rigidly into place from the start, their bleak trajectories heavily signposted by the writing. There’s a thin line between a vicious cycle and predictability.