Derelict
There’s a reason the bloodiest Jacobean stage genre is tagged ‘revenge tragedy’ rather than – as in many action pictures – ‘revenge fantasy’. Jonathan Zaurin’s Derelict focuses on Abi (Suzanne Fulton), a young woman whose every scrap of joy in life (she used to like classical music) has been stripped as she focuses on getting rough justice for the murder of her beloved though perhaps fringe-criminal father Ben (Dean Kilbey).
While her sister (Stacey Coleman) has ‘moved on’, Abi haunts the undeveloped brownfield site – under a bridge to nowhere – where Ben was found stripped, earless, zip-tied and dying … and is incensed at the shade of ‘the one who survived’, a man released from prison who is stumbling in his own heroin fug (‘you pick up bad habits in prison’) around an anonymous midlands community where every path is blocked by gaggles of bearded blokes who bombard passersby with sexualised threat which always has some element of homoerotic violence even when directed at women. In a series of interleaved, out-of-order scenes which go back to the source of Abi’s mania, we meet brothers Matt (Michael Coombes) – a lump in a hoodie, who has one friend he feels semi-comfortable talking to and takes care of his presumably dying mother – and Ewan (Pete Bird), who returns after a prison spell (and having ‘cleaned out’ Matt and his Mum last time he visited) and takes it on himself to wheedle his brother away from his only pal and into a petty crime which escalates into the atrocity which gets Abi on the brothers’ case.
Abi’s revenge – and her need for a weapon to use – is as unplanned, spontaneous and eventually sidelined by other events as the original crime. There’s a grim satisfaction in that at least someone who really deserves it receives the brunt of her wrath, but she doesn’t feel it … and this is far more a case of people over their heads without support system in a world beyond law, morality, order or aesthetics. It could almost be a post-apoclyptic vision – imagine a de-prettified Rumble Fish – but is actually a scrappy, realist work … deliberately paced (it takes two hours not to tell the expected story, with plenty of contemplative non sequiturs or rub-your-nose-in-it repetitions, vividly characterisations (its trio of evil bearded guys are just human sharks) and impressive, interior performances from linch-pins Fulton and Coombes. Co-written by Zaurin, Todd Rodgers, Michael Mackenzie and Kat Ellinger; edited and photographed by Zaurin.
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