Seven methods of killing kylie jenner, Royal Court, review: Twitter, racism and incendiary writing

In 2019, when Jasmine Lee-Jones’s debut play, ‘seven methods of killing kylie jenner’, won her the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright, she began her acceptance speech by saying: “I think theatre should be dangerous.” Provocative title aside, when the play premiered Upstairs at the Royal Court that year, it quickly became evident that Lee-Jones’s astute, inventive, incendiary writing was the proof of that conviction.

Transferring to the Royal Court’s main space, it returns for a six-week run, barely a year after the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd. This two-hander tussles with how structural racism devalues and fetishises black women’s bodies, and how an attendant colorism pits lighter-skinned black women against their darker-skinned sisters; it connects both to history in the figure of Saartjie Baartman, aka the “Hottentot Venus”, a South African woman displayed in the “human zoos” of early-19th-century London and Paris.

It’s also about friendship and behaviour on social media today. Holed up in her bedroom, Cleo (Leanne Henlon, in her professional debut) is writing a dissertation about systemic racism. She has retreated from the physical world after being recently dumped, but is far from silent. Enraged by Forbes magazine’s declaration that Kylie Jenner is “the world’s youngest ‘self-made’ billionaire” – “that b---h is about as self-made as my bed” – she takes to Twitter under the anonymous handle of @incognegro to troll Jenner in raucously funny Tweets detailing the seven hypothetical ways in which the celebrity might be dispatched.

She wants Jenner dead, she tells her queer best friend Kara (Tia Bannon), because Jenner has appropriated black women’s looks for profit: Jenner sells cosmetic fillers for fuller lips when black women have long been denigrated for having the same features. But Kara thinks Cleo’s Tweets are extreme, and this triggers a showdown between the two friends in which past grievances erupt to the surface. At one point, during their Gunfight at the OK Corral-style standoff, tumbleweed floats across the stage in a visual gag that prompted unrestrained laughter from the audience. Lee-Jones is astonishingly adept at using coruscating humour to leaven her sombre themes.

The ingenious aspect of this play is how Lee-Jones’s script and Milli Bhatia’s direction collapse the difference between the Twittersphere and Cleo’s real domestic life. This is wonderfully aided by designer Raija Shakiry’s visual metaphor: a white web-like structure with dangling ropes, which looms over the characters like a lynching tree and lights up with the virtual cacophony that characterises the speed of a viral Twitter thread.

The dangling ropes also symbolise Cleo’s undoing when she fails to recognise the perils of Twitter’s rough justice: it digs up her old homophobic Tweets. She has given herself enough metaphorical rope to hang herself in the Twittersphere. But she begins to find redemption when she delivers a fiery speech detailing the sorry history of Baartman, who was cited by European scientists, during her lifetime, as an example of the bestiality of black women. More than 200 years after her death, black women are still struggling with the legacy of that indictment.

Staging the internet has been an enduring thorny question for theatre-makers. At the National Theatre in 1997, Patrick Marber’s Closer defaulted to video-screen projections of characters typing, which didn’t get it right. But this production does, because it uses the actors’ physicality to grotesquely embody the memes, gifs, acronyms (OMG, FFS, TBH) that fill the racist Tweets. (I’m sure I recognised a monkey that recalled the former BBC broadcaster Danny Baker’s “Royal baby leaves hospital” Tweet.)

‘seven methods of killing kylie jenner’ doesn’t pull its punches, doesn’t make allowances for older viewers who will almost certainly be baffled by the all text speak, and in the end, doesn’t let anyone in the audience off the hook for their complicity in the issues it critiques. It’s all the more brilliant for all of that – and it’s intriguing to speculate where Lee-Jones might turn her skewering eye next.

Until July 27. Tickets: royalcourttheatre.com; 020 7565 5000