★★★★
Content warning: discussions of domestic violence. If you require support, further information can be found on the UK Government website.
For the uninitiated: in May, various women were posed the question “If you had to be stuck in the forest with a man or a bear, who would you choose?” Promptly, most women responded with confidence–the bear. Amidst the ensuing furore, TikTok user @sharkymarieee broke it down simply. “The worst a bear can do is kill me… People would believe me, they would feel bad for me, and they would make sure the bear doesn’t attack anyone else.”
Watching Bindweed just two months after this viral hypothesis feels decidedly fitting. At first, you wonder how the play will pull it off, since portraying men who commit acts of domestic abuse against women in any sort of sympathetic light is something a lot of playwrights would veer away from. How to possibly do it tactfully, to present the realities of these men, whose only common denominator is the crime they’ve committed, as actual people rather than two-dimensional monstrosities? How to explore their motivations and find out why they ended up committing such atrocities? Fortunately, playwright Martha Loader has found the magic formula to manage it.
Her play, winner of the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting 2022, owes this success to a number of factors. Bindweed follows Jen (Laura Hanna), an ex-police officer determined to break the cycle of domestic abuse amongst the four men under her guidance. Each of them has been convicted for domestic abuse offences and required to undergo a perpetrator programme with Jen at the helm. As the play proceeds, the men’s troubled psyches are laid bare, with snippets of Jen’s personal life revealed in equal measure, where the men she meets for dates or through friends display similarly troubling behaviour that verges on aggressive and distasteful. It’s a daring question worth asking that the play neatly probes: okay, so if “not all men,” how many men actually are just a few steps away from the precipice of abuse?
Loader has more than a few factors to her advantage. The cast know what they’re doing and for a play with quite so many characters, having the supporting players take on multiple roles is a wise choice (although a superfluous few could probably be trimmed: do we really need Alistair?). The team make commendable use of the Arcola Theatre’s intimate staging: choosing to plant the actors in the audience until the show begins is a shrewd move, further breaking that wall of assumption that the men depicted aren’t like us. Other nice additions include the use of Robin Thicke’s famously problematic ‘Blurred Lines’ playing in the background, blue and pink lighting to recall traditionally gender-designated colours, and a particularly well-choreographed bowling sequence. Scenes of Jen on a date with Peter (whose laddish work colleagues have nicknamed him “Paedo” because it sounds slightly like his name—for the bants!) are particularly excruciating—Loader peppers the dialogue with painfully familiar traits of toxic masculinity you can’t help but cringe at in recognition. The stage design is effective too, greeting us at the start with a proscenium arch built from a spiral of grey chairs, lamps and windows ascending up to the ceiling and back down again—a whirlwind of domestic items in freefall that could easily be brandished as weapons. At the play’s midpoint, such a chair proves a significant, disturbing plot device.
Where the play isn’t so sure-footed is in its exploration of why the men have committed these crimes. Whilst the characters are believable and have commendably varied backstories, seeing them leap from “nice guy” to enraged tyrant can feel abrupt. In the case of Brian (Sean Kingsley) in particular, the climactic moment of his character arc feels so extreme it’s like something from a different play altogether, or perhaps a horror film. There’s an inadvertent theme of the character’s emotions being perhaps unintentionally off-kilter. Case in point, Jen’s timid handling of the situation at work doesn’t often ring true—her nerviness at the beginning as she commandeers the group’s session doesn’t feel like the actions of a former police officer, since surely someone with that background would be more forthright, and her outburst where she loses her temper and snaps at the group “You beat your f***ing partners to a pulp!” feels uncharacteristically unprofessional. Emotions run rife in a play with this subject matter, sure, but in these instances, the pay-off often feels unearned. A smaller point too, but the play’s title, presumably using a problematic vine known for its invasive nature as a metaphor for abusers, doesn’t quite work, since botany doesn’t get even a remote mention in the play and feels randomly assigned here.
A worthy look at the reality behind domestic abusers and the people paid to rehabilitate them, Bindweed approaches a challenging subject matter with aplomb. The Bruntwood Prize committee clearly made the right call.
Bindweed is on at the Arcola Theatre until 13 July.
Words by James Morton
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