Is God Is, Royal Court Theatre review ★★★★★

‘Dirty South’ twins Anaia and Racine are on a mission from God. Their God just happens to be their mother. A mother they haven’t seen for 18 years, who they thought was dead from the fire that left the twins visually and emotionally scarred for life. Monstrously savaged by burns, their mother has written to them to come visit her in hospital as she lays dying. Her one request is that her daughters kill the man responsible for setting their lives aflame: their father.

This call to action leads the twins across America in search for revenge. Everywhere they go they leave a trail of blood in their path. Although the play is riddled with violence and a relentless discard for human life, there are laugh-out-loud gags throughout. Obie award-winning playwright Aleshea Harris takes genuine glee in portraying the grotesque, and through Is God Is illustrates the darkest corners of the human soul and our communal lust for vengeance.

Adelayo Adedayo and Tamara Lawrance. Credit: Tristram Kenton

Royal Court staple set designer Chloe Lamford uses her signature garish style for the set design, creating a cartoonish landscape for these characters to manipulate each other. Actor Cecilia Noble provides a stellar performance as ‘She’, the mother and Godhead. She steals the show with her riveting and deathly-still blow-by-blow account of what happened on that fateful day 18 years ago.

Another regular at the Royal Court, director Ola Ince uses a light touch with the cast, and at times runs too loose a ship, with some characters like the drunken suicidal lawyer Chuck Hall (actor Ray Emmet Brown) existing in a pantomime world. In some scenes there isn’t enough grounding for the actors to authentically inhabit their characters. As a result, they are allowed to delight too much in the farcical nature of their characters.

Cecilia Noble. Credit: Tristram Kenton

The individual characters are at times one note and not fully lived in, each playing one emotion at full throttle: the diabolical father, the neurotic new wife, the succulent-obsessed son, and his swaggering poet twin brother. Protagonists Anaia and Racine are more fully wrought, but still the nuances of their characters have not been fully developed, so it feels like they only live for an hour and a half and are then tucked away into the theatre wings, instead of living and breathing beyond the stage.

That being said, the show is captivating and entertaining throughout, pushing the audience to the edge of its seat. This is not an enjoyable theatrical experience, it’s more of a hold your face in your hands as you peep through your fingers to see what ghastly moment of human suffering happens next.

Adelayo Adedayo and Tamara Lawrance. Credit: Tristram Kenton

Playwright Harris knows exactly what she is doing when it comes to pulling at the emotional heart strings of an audience. She has created a gut-wrenching piece of dramedy, sculpting a visceral ending that leaves her audience shaken, with a collective, audible intake of breath at the climax.

Go experience this piece of theatre when you are in the mood for a white-knuckle ride. Steel yourself, because it ain’t a pretty beginning, middle or ending.