Review: An Injury (Ovalhouse)

As with previous shows, Kieran Hurley here uses a driving storytelling form rather than offering inhabited characters, per se. But where he’s previously performed his own work, An Injury is shared between four actors, who in choppy, fast-paced rhythms switch between four characters, as well as narrating the story. They read from books; they instruct the focus to "zoom in… zoom out" on these intertwining lives, like surveillance cameras, or a drone looking down from above.

Drones are important in An Injury – a symbol for how we are distanced from the reality of violence. Joe is a drone pilot; she may have killed a little Arab girl called Isma when piloting her 'plane', but that’s at an unreal remove. She’s interviewed by Danny, a radical left-wing wannabe writer, who watches ISIS beheadings in the name of research but is so bogged down in academic ideas and his own tortured privilege, he’s incapable of taking action. Danny nearly gets run over by Morvern, an overworked corporate drone whose data entry job is inputting the names of rejected asylum seekers.

Sometimes, it feels like there’s a tick list of modern societal ills to get through here. Although Hurley throws in devastatingly good observational lines, there’s less of the pinpoint black humour that made his last show, Heads Up – a similarly bleak take on the pressures of modern living – so scorching.

But there is still masses of interesting meat to sink your teeth into in this ambitious work. Tensions rise, debates rage: about moral red lines or the need for defence, the power and impact of the act of looking, whether it’s better to be kind as an individual or use whatever means necessary to smash the whole damn system… An Injury builds to a fever pitch around the idea that collectively we’ve learnt to switch off from violence, not to really see it – and Danny becomes obsessed with making "manifest" the brutality that underpins everything in our society.

Kieran skilfully pilots us towards various dramatic denouements, acts of violence that tie the threads together, before resisting them, rewriting them. It’s clever, reminding us of our urge for the storytelling structure to do its thing, to give us a catharsis, to give us – yes – the big blood-spurting scene. It upends that.

Yet An Injury also seems to want to make us genuinely confront violence: "this stuff’s real, it’s happening now" is a repeated refrain. This can feel forced, in a play which is also so busily reminding us of its theatrical artifice. An Injury acknowledges art’s limitations – but it still kind of tries to overleap them, and doesn’t quite make it.

The interchangeability of the four actors also puts their characters at one remove, within a very self-conscious framework. They all have slightly differing interpretations of each character, making the show a cacophonous polyphony rather than offering four distinct portraits of four human individuals. This may be the point, but the show’s earlier stages feel like they could benefit from more empathy, even if actually to get there requires more artifice, more 'acting'. And while the cast are all excellently energetic, vivid and spiky under alex swift’s direction, they’re not quite on top of their lines yet, and delivery occasionally veers into that stagey 'spoken word voice'.

Nonetheless, this is a bracingly intelligent show rammed with ideas and delivered with fizz. The rapid-fire pacing helps propel the story, leaving you grasping hurriedly at the themes and images within it, lest you miss something crucial.

An Injury runs at Ovalhouse until 22 July.