Is God Is, review: The Royal Court hasn’t seen this much violence since 1995

Friday night at the Royal Court, and the stalls look – shock! – about a third empty. It’s staging a provocative award-winning Black comedy from the States – a key part of its autumn season – and where, at the very least, are the faithful?

The powers that be at London’s sputtering new-writing hotspot must be praying that Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is (2018) catches fire at the box office. It’s certainly got the credentials to be a major talking point. Has there been as much simulated violence on stage here since Sarah Kane’s Blasted in 1995?

The agents of destruction are two young women – twins in fact, Racine and Anaia – engaged on a mission, from North to the South, thence to the Californian desert, to avenge the attack almost 20 years earlier that turned their mother into a human fire-ball. Her dying gasps to her girls – scarred too, though less heinously – command Old Testament retribution.

Thinking of her as God – their ‘creator’ – who are they to refuse her? The only snag is the culprit was their no-good dad, whom she wants “Dead, real dead”. Cecilia Noble gives a riveting masterclass in upright dignity, her bed fixed at a vertical, as she rasps her requests.

The mood is mock-Hollywood by way of the House of Atreus, Tarantino meets Greek Tragedy; a loose lyricism helping the conversational flow. The pair – played in Ola Ince’s smartly executed production by a coolly offhand Tamara Lawrance and Adelayo Adedayo – drip nonchalance as they plot their course towards that act of intrafamilial horror. A stone in a sock is the main method of dispatch, felling a garrulous, self-disgusted lawyer, the unnamed patriarch’s new wife and one of his twin sons. The other one, a wannabe poet, lurches into view with a knife in his back.

The battering is done with a video game rapidity and cartoonish sound-effects. The twins are like ciphers, not giving much thought to the morality or consequences of their actions, but doing what each situation needs – twerking like the call-girls their half-brothers first take them for.

That withholding of sustained ‘argument’ might seem novel; it also feels as if Harris has written a draft for a TV series, where it would work better. Some effort is put into asserting the ‘theatricality’ of the occasion – the characters talk about themselves in the third person, and the heroines themselves act like stage-hands, rotating the brightly painted cod Wendy house, in which their prey comically resides, as required.

Is there a ‘debate’ to be had about what the play is saying? The father’s matter of fact self-justification is that he wasn’t respected as a young man – which might be a summation of callousness, a critique on African-American masculinity, a comment on wider (white) society, a pointer to existential meaninglessness, or a joke at the expense of our patience.

Maybe it’s up to us to read what we want into the action. I certainly kept watching, but couldn’t help wondering – given how many huge issues are now in play in the real-world – if the whole affair isn’t a case of fiddling while Rome burns.

Until Oct 23. Tickets: 020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com