Gruesome Playground Injuries

In Gruesome Playground Injuries, injury, or trauma - physical or mental – is a substitute for intimacy – but also the perverse bond that draws Kayleen (Marlea Correy) and Dougie (Rory Harman) together.  The ironic title – playground injuries – suggests that the characters are stuck forever in their first encounter.  That’s in their parochial Catholic school sick bay when they are eight years old.  She has a terrible (but not that terrible) stomach-ache, and he has a bloody bandage around a head wound; he’s split his head open by riding his bicycle off the school roof – ‘like Evel Knievel at the Grand Canyon’.  Kayleen might think he’s crazy, or say that he is, but she’s fascinated by the injury and wants to touch it.  Playwright Rajiv Joseph doesn’t stress the characters’ Catholicism, but it’s there and not incidental.

In this story, ‘Can I touch it?’ does not have the usual love story meaning.  This 2009 American play has been called a ‘reverse romcom – but while it’s frequently funny due to the wisecracks and repartee between the pair, the underlying pathos on both sides of this masochistic relationship is always present.  We see the next thirty years of their friendship – or thwarted, blocked love affair – played out in eight tight, allusive scenes across about 80 minutes.  They meet at a funeral, in a mental institution, and in a various hospital rooms.  Each time Dougie has a new injury or Kayleen has endured some trauma that prevents connection or the healing that Doug wants from her.

He is nerdy and needy but ironically upbeat.  His parents describe him as ‘accident prone’ but that’s a euphemism for self-harming, which consists of patently dangerous risk taking: the bicycle off the roof is just the start.  And his cheerful pride in his injuries is so wince-makingly sad.  The object of his affections, Kayleen, has an unloving father (who, incidentally, hates Dougie); she has a brief, failed relationship with another guy, and so on.  She is perpetually anxious, closed off, miserable, abused and also self-harming.  She fears any penetration of her character armour.  Every move leads to a dead end.  In one scene, Dougie attempts to kiss her, clearly something he’s been planning or wanted for a long time.  Kayleen fights him off, violently pushing him off and away.  How we want her to melt.  No – impossible.

The scenes play out in non-linear order – scenes in which Kayleen and Doug are aged eight, twenty-three, thirteen, twenty-eight, eighteen, thirty-three, twenty-three and thirty-eight.  I confess I had to look up that order and the characters’ ages, but apparently there are meant to be projected titles at the head of each scene, such as, ’23: Eye blown out.’  This production doesn’t have that resource and it would help if it did. 

The text also specifies that transitions between scenes, in which the actors change costumes, apply the next wound, or remove the last one, playing out in full view of the audience.  Director Ellen Wiltshire has retained that feature so I’ll assume that it is intended to take us out of the story for contemplation and relief from a story in which we might think these characters aren’t a lot more than their medical or neurotic histories.  There are scant references to anything else.

Despite these restrictions and limitations, and the relative slightness of the piece, Ms Wiltshire’s use of the Butterfly Club’s very limited and basic space and her detailed direction of the performances, command our close attention and engagement throughout.  Marlea Correy and Rory Harman give excellent performances; they are so good, so resonant with supressed feeling and subtext, that they overcome our resistance and we come to care deeply about these two damaged characters and experience a sympthy and a painful frustration that they cannot get past themselves and connect.  A small chamber piece, skilfully and movingly realised.

Michael Brindley