Review: Killer Joe at The Basement

Photo / Supplied by Eryn Wilson

If you're good at suspending disbelief, and find threats and guns entertaining, you'll probably quite enjoy Killer Joe. When a Texan trailer park family engages a contract killer to kill their ex-wife/ mother for the insurance money, you just know they're asking for trouble.

You even know what kind of trouble they're asking for; Joe ain't got his nickname for his fishing, y'all.

Cheap thrills are the goals of this show rather than believable characters or a plausible plot with a point to make. The relatively brief glimpses of nudity and violence are both voyeuristic and disturbing - a cleverly uneasy mix. They don't feel gratuitous - but the white-trash stereotypes do.

The Smith family are dumb. They beat each other up, they whore each other out, they wear a lot of denim, they offer beer as a cure-all in every crisis (makes more sense than tea, after all). Unlike the Wests in Outrageous Fortune, none of the Smiths is three-dimensional enough for the audience to care what happens to them - they're unsympathetically written by a middle-class playwright (Tracy Letts) to be laughed at by middle-class audiences.

The acting, directed by Cameron Rhodes, is mixed. Sara Wiseman has excellent stage presence and steals her scenes as the tarty second wife, Sharla, and Beth Allen does a good job as the sweet, idiot-savant daughter Dottie (displaying her innocence with a Mickey Mouse T-shirt). But Craig Hall plays the stoner dad by disappearing into the background, while Charlie McDermott's contrasting vigour as the good-for-nothing son is welcome but equally one-note.

Colin Moy looks uncomfortable and impassive as the all-important title character - Dottie says that Joe's eyes hurt her when he looks at her, but that intensity is missing.

Like the characters, the accents are unconvincing - too fast for a Texan drawl. But this, coupled with the well-paced exchanges, means things roll along at a nice clip. Simon Coleman's hyper-realistic trailer home set looks like it's taken a lot of effort, and it's pleasingly busy and filthy: coathanger TV antenna, lampshade askew, broken blinds.

This is a shallow show but, hey, if you're not looking for something deep and meaningful, it would love to take you for a ride.