Image credit: Alex Brenner

Kill Me Now: even the title is bleakly comedic. The dramatic finality of death chucked into the banality of domesticity. That’s exactly the nail that Kill Me Now hits and it hits it hard as it shows us that there is nothing banal about domesticity whatsoever. Each ‘everyday’ family is coping with something and every everyday family loves, cares and devotes differently. Brad Fraser’s black comedy follows the Sturdy family whose dedicated hunt for some level of banality is rockier than most.

Jake Sturdy (Greg Wise) lost his mother and wife 12 years ago and has since dedicated almost every aspect of his life to raising his severely disabled son Joey (Oliver Gomm). Fraser has painted a picture of the classic protagonist: a writer whose only work told of the perfect son he was about to have, whose life has been drastically turned on its head, while we watch him cope. Jake isn’t the typical protagonist, though, because he isn’t coping, he isn’t living, he is merely doing. One evening a week he is relieved of his duties by his sister Twyler (who is supposed to be ten years younger but is more like 20) who Jake raised after the death of their mother. All three are utterly dedicated to each other but are desperately seeking their own version of normality.

The audience are transported to the Sturdy’s imploding and claustrophobic environment immediately. Under Braham Murray’s helm we are startled into awareness and drawn in instantaneously. The opening scene sees Jake lifting his fully-grown son Joey into a bath. Pubescence has further intensified Joey’s desperation to be normal. Right in the middle of his turbulent self-doubt he goes and gets an erection and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it: a brutal display of his helplessness that every one of us could understand. In the spirit of black comedy, audience members of every age and class let out a little snigger at the use of the word ‘boner’, taking us all back to GCSE maths.

Each of these scenes are as short as they are intense, making it feel a little bit like a soap. They were interspersed with abrupt blackout, detaching us from the action for that bit too long – there must be more interesting ways to fill gaps between scenes than turning the lights off. Having said that, all the actors maintained their characters even in darkness adding more and more ambiguity between what’s acting and what’s real.

Greg Wise delivers a powerfully steady performance. Jake is a man on the edge, but a man so used to being on the edge that the edge has become the norm. Wise portrays this with the most impeccable balance, fit to burst with emotion and anguish, but remaining steady and collected.

Oliver Gomm as Joey wasn’t far short of incredible. He had perfected a speech pattern and a sense of humour for Joey that are empathetic and massively skilled. I believed that Gomm was a disabled actor until I saw him meander into the bar afterwards. As Joey switches from dependent to dependable, from boy to man, Gomm manages to draw us in even further.

There is a twist in the narrative that makes a happy ending impossible, but nonetheless it was an ending that stuck with me. There was a standing ovation at the end and not one person standing had a dry eye. I made an attempt to mingle in the bar afterwards with a heavily mascara-marked face but I was so affected that I was offended (ridiculously) by people’s frivolity so soon after the harrowing and important piece of theatre we’d all just seen.

Kill Me Now is playing at Park Theatre until 29 March. For more information and tickets, see the Park Theatre website.