If pain, as they say, reaffirms that we’re alive, the two characters in Gruesome Playground Injuries can be in no doubt of their vitality.
Eyes are lost, legs shattered and hearts broken time and again in this European premiere of Pulitzer Prize finalist Rajiv Joseph’s touching drama that is vomit-inducing for the performers but not, thankfully, for the audience.
The story is simple, as so many of the best are. Kayleen and Doug meet in a school nurse’s office. She’s suffering a gnawing nausea, he’s just cycled off the roof playing Evel Knievel. For the next 80 minutes we follow key points in the friends’ relationship. Every meeting is served with pain, physically, mentally and emotionally. The chronology leaps around like a barefoot dancer on a carpet of broken glass, but costume, performances and the state of each character’s health ensures we know exactly where we are.
Where is that? Well, it’s anywhere between the 80s and now in the US, watching a co-dependent relationship laid brutally bare. Felix Scott’s Doug, excitable as a boy with a lust for facing danger and finding a joyful glee in the injuries it leaves him with – and not much different as an adult – becomes besotted with Mariah Gale’s shielded, protective Kayleen. She is less eager to give herself over to him and so the tension between friendship and love, companionship and lust hangs heavy and takes its toll.
The pair move easily between ages, from enquiring, interested youngsters to inquisitive and embarrassed teenagers and adults with all the challenges grown up life brings and then some, stepping backwards and forwards without tripping.
Director Justin Audibert, at the helm of the production having won the Leverhulme Bursary, gives the performers licence to linger during these time shifts. They change costumes and create injuries on stage in ways both tender and harsh that reveal as much about their relationship as anything spoken.
Isobel Waller-Bridge’s atmospheric sound eases these mood shifts, while watching the action on Lily Arnold’s clinical set, which splits the Gate’s auditorium in two, brings the audience further into the piece and leaves us gazing across at our counterparts through a touching, witty and painfully truthful relationship that is segmented and whole, fleeting and forever at once.