'Armadillo' review or 'Safety catch on?'

Armadillo, Sarah Kosar
The Yard Theatre, 6th June 2019
Written for The Guardian 

Fifteen years ago, Sam was abducted from her family home. Now another local teenager has gone missing and the TV stations are lit up with the news. A search party has gathered, Facebook is in meltdown and “J day” – Jessica day – has just been named. “He’s probably kissing her right now,” says Sam of Jessica and her kidnapper. The scary thing? There’s envy nestled in there, amid the fear and sorrow.

Sarah Kosar’s latest play isn’t easy. It doesn’t always work, or even make sense. But her follow-up to Mumburger is horribly captivating and, in all its twisted eccentricity, peculiarly contemporary. There are hints of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as we watch Sam (Michelle Fox, electric) descend into a strange depression and, with the help of husband John (Mark Quartley), embroil brother Scotty (Nima Taleghani) in a dangerous game. There’s an element of fairytale too. Sara Joyce’s triumphantly disjointed production, all neon lights and jagged blackouts (bold work from Jessica Hung Han Yun), never feels quite real. Jasmine Swan’s eerie dreamscape set is lined with a moat, filled with glowing stepping stones.

Then there are the guns. Lots and lots of guns. Guns line the wall; they’re stashed in the freezer and they’re brandished in the bedroom. They offer protection and stimulation, comfort and fear. On huge screens fixed on the back wall, TV snippets flash, fracture and melt away to nothing, the mesmerising work of video designer Ash J Woodward. The footage lights up Sam’s face with a ghoulish glow. Here is a world at once horribly familiar and utterly strange, where fame and depression, danger and love dance together in the spotlight.