Durians feature prominently in Chris Fittock’s debut play, presented by the Liverpool New Writing Theatre — those spiky, thick-skinned tropical fruit renowned both for the sweetness of their flesh and for their foul stench. Here they are a smelly motif in writing so unfocused and overloaded with metaphor that it neglects the dramatic essentials of character development and structure.
Red, back from a nameless war, sits on his scrap of barren land, attempting to coax fruit from the ravaged soil. A woman, Val, teases and interrogates him. She has had his baby in his absence, but implies that it is dead — perhaps she herself killed it. She refers to herself as “mama” and even offers her breast to Red to suckle. Meanwhile, unseen, a man slowly bleeds to death. Then Amy appears. She, too, has a claim on Red’s body and affections.
All of which throws up many more questions than Fittock answers. We are never sure whether the relationship between Val and Red is genuinely incestuous, or if Val is merely misdirecting her maternal instinct to her damaged and vulnerable “soldier boy”. Nor does the identity of the dying man ever become clear. Instead, the drama stifles in symbolism. The durians are referred to in addictive terms, as if they were a drug. The weather, it is reported, changes abruptly from blistering hot to freezing cold — possibly a reference to global warming. References to fertility — of the women and of the earth — abound, and love, like the soft, pulpy heart of the thorny fruit, can be reached only after a violent struggle to penetrate a tough exterior.
This florid muddle, couched in staccato language that, though ripe with sexual expletives and dripping with blood, is too contrived to engage, is not improved by Graeme Maley’s static production. Lucia Cox as Val spends nearly the entire play trapped behind a pile of soil in a corner; Mark Wood’s Red and Simone Holmes’s Amy simply stand and shout at each other. They perform with conviction; but Fittock’s ideas about martial and civilian violence and the mingled savagery and tenderness of sex and love lack originality, just as his execution, and Maley’s direction, lack discipline and clarity.
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