Review: PENETRATOR, Lion & Unicorn Theatre

When Anthony Neilson's Penetrator debuted in Edinburgh in 1993, it offered a grim reflection on the male psyche at the end of Thatcher's mandate. The Gulf War and the violence it brought for the boys who fought it made its way into the flat of two young men in their early 20s as their damaged old friend.

The play was then given a full refurbishment in the mid-2010s for a revival, and it's now been further revised to make space for a handful of apt Trump references. The set-up is quite simple: Max and Alan are having another relatively quiet night in, playing cards and doing drugs with some wild dancing intervals. Then, Tadge shows up with blood splattered on his military gear. What follows is a bona fide nail-biting thriller.

Steve Fitzgerald directs with heart-racing detail. While the start of the piece might not look like much both in writing and staging, once the second scene kicks off the core plot he starts to build the energy with perfectly calibrated pace. He also takes the role of Tadge, bringing the temperature of the room to chilling levels whenever he enters the space. He presents a paranoid man whose soul has been destroyed by his deployment. The horrors of war, the lack of mental health support, and his personal anguish seep into his movements and constant paranoia.

The horrifying matter-of-fact attitude he employs to describe the brutal scenarios he encountered is marred by the alleged sexual torture he's just managed to escape. He is singularly unsettling as he tips off the balance of his friends' flat. Luke Willats and Paul Linghorn are Max and Alan, two average white young males who are simply not equipped to deal with Tadge's erratic behaviour. Willats is hilarious in the shabbiness of his character; he's introduced as a rather sad guy whose past trauma comes out through inappropriate banter and endless teasings.

Willats' rambunctious stage persona is softened by Linghorn's reflective and seemingly more mature personality. Fitzgerald evolves their chemistry by heightening the dangerous trajectory of Neilson's shocking tale. A trace of snarky black humour permeates the length of the play, but Linghorn's deliberately serious direction slowly forces the audience to become aware of the inappropriateness of their laughs.

The subtlety of his work becomes clear through the brief but deep silences shared by the characters, which are nourished by the unsaid and unaddressed notions in the script. Alan's closeted sexuality and Max's approach to his and his friend's are never mentioned, but become additional bullets in Tadge's metaphorical gun.

It's sickening how relevant Penetrator still is 26 years after its conception, all it took to prove it is an updated name-check. Uncanny Collective certainly know how to toy with the tension in the writing, delivering a show that is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. Most than anything, they manage to seize the attention of their public and focus it on the direct effects of certain political choices. Post-deployment Tadge is a creature born out of violent crimes committed in a hush-hush system that doesn't allow for victims to come forward.

Max's permanent scarring at the hand of Tadge's past actions also highlight a bigger systematic problem that covers men's mental health, the stigma around it, and the lack of awareness of male sexual assault. Penetrator doesn't offer any sympathy or real solution in the long run, and actually paints quite a grim and exceptionally tense picture of the situation and its mishandling. It's a distressing play both in its language and in the way its narrative is pushed forward, but it starts an essential and complicated conversation.

Penetrator runs at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre until 23 November.

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