This drama is brimful of taboo - but lacks tension
September 26, 2019 13:27There is an old saying, or is it a joke, that a mother’s place is in the wrong. In Evan Placey’s 2010 drama, which is inspired by real events, Tracy-Ann Oberman takes on the role of Brenda Kapowitz, a high-achieving single mother whose 17-year-old son Matthew has raped three girls of around the same age in one night.
Yet although Matthew was the perpetrator, much of the public anger about his actions is directed towards his mother via the scrum of photographers and journalists doorstepping the Kapowitz’s Toronto home.
Placey recognises rather rather than over-eggs the Jewishness of the Kapowitz clan, presumably reflecting the real life case on which the play is based. In this besieged Jewish home, Chanukah is observed and presents exchanged as the court case draws near. But there is nothing to suggest that religion has anything to do with the crime, except perhaps that the warmth of the relationship between Matthew (played by Scott Folan with sweet natured understatement) and his eight-year-old brother Jason, makes it even harder to understand.
Oberman convincingly conveys how a mother’s unconditional love for her son becomes not so much hate as an emotional void. And the force with which she ejects from her home Matthew’s visiting girlfriend feels like a way of protect her rather than him. Yet other than the potent scene in which Kapowitz confronts her son about the events that led to the crime, Max Lindsay’s production generates much less tension than you might expect in a drama brimful of taboo.
Meanwhile the Kapowitz’s friend and lawyer Robert Rosenberg (Simon Hepworth) attempts to keep the family stable as newspaper and television news headlines threaten to destroy it. And it is here that Placey makes his most pertinent point, that behind the judgmental headlines lies a lurid kind of misogyny that implies the sex crimes of the son are somehow a reflection of the mother’s attitude towards sex. But it is suggested rather than investigated.
Lee Newby’s design, which sets the action in a uniformly grey set, in which everything from the walls to props has been drained of colour, may have been intended to suggest the impact of the crime on a once warm family. But actually it suspends everything in a kind of bleached version of home that gives little sense of how much has been lost as a result of a boy’s crime.