Pig Farm at St James Theatre, SW1
reviewed for The Times, 30 October 2015
Charlotte Parry (Tina) and Erik Odom as the hired hand Tim
Image credit: Donald Cooper
In Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Stella tells her sister, of her earthy, abusive husband Stanley, “there are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark that sort of make everything else seem — unimportant”.
It’s the leitmotif to a brutal, elemental American tragedy. In Greg Kotis’s functionally titled Pig Farm, blond Tina looks across a kitchen at her husband’s labourer and tells him that “when a man looks at a woman — a real man — there’s a hunger in his eyes, a deep, down hunger”.
This could be the stuff of a modern Williams tragedy — muscled men sweat and screw against a backdrop of failed American dreams — until Kotis’s tonal mishmash of a pork-based farce veers back, bumpily, to the crassly comic.
Ronald Reagan told his supporters: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ ” Here the G-man is oily Teddy, cruel hand of the Environmental Protection Agency, sent to inspect Tina and her husband Tom’s farm amid allegations of river pollution. Hide the faecal sludge! (The alliterative names are one of your few early clues that Kotis is trying to write a comedy. Tim, a juvenile delinquent farm hand, makes up this quartet; Trevor, Tony, Tully and Tyler are offstage. Riotous.)
Kotis had a hit with Urinetown, a dystopian musical about water shortages and urine-regulation; bold numbers such as Urinetown’sIt’s a Privilege to Pee are replaced here with circular speeches on the processing of pig poop. Trying the same trick without Kotis’s musical collaborator Mark Hollmann feels like the big mistake: when our characters are fools, we need a bit of razzmatazz to keep the absurdism going.
The cast do a brave job in trying circumstances, especially Stephen Tompkinson as leering, super-subtle Teddy. As Tom, Dan Fredenburgh’s ode to sludge-dumping has shades of Dr Strangelove’s delight in body fluids.
Yet the tone is consistently off in Katharine Farmer’s production: Teddy’s attempted sexual blackmail of Tina (a breezy Charlotte Parry) feels particularly unfunny. We chortle at the blood-soaked finale, but we’ve no reason to care.
