Theatre review: Blood On Your Hands

Blood was nearly spilt before the show even started, as we got to ten minutes after the advertised start time and the twentieth repetition of the 60-second loop of funereal accordion music on the speakers. But officially the villain of Grace Joy Howarth's Blood On Your Hands is the meat industry, not The Araby Bazaar's sound design. Dan (Phillip John Jones) and Konstyantyn (Shannon Smith) are slaughterhouse workers who meet on their lunch break: The latter is a Ukrainian vet who's just arrived in Wales, taking on a grim minimum wage job until he can get himself settled and bring his family over. The former is a local who, after making some mistakes in his teens, has struggled to find anything better and has been in the job for five years. Most mornings they go into work to the sound of vegans protesting outside the abattoir.

Leading the vegans is Eden (Liv Jekyll,) Dan's vegan ex-girlfriend who is vegan. Ironically we discover she was the one who encouraged him to take the job, only for the stories he brought home to be what pushed her to the opposite extreme.

Given that the play has all the marks of being a vegan play by vegans for vegans (unafraid to live up to a stereotype, a large amount of the audience had clothes and bags announcing to the world at large that they’re vegan,) what I found most interesting about Blood On Your Hands was where Howarth levels much of her criticism. Dan and Kostyantyn are unambiguously the sympathetic figures here, victims of circumstance with few to no other options, while Eden’s made veganism her personality and has no capacity for nuance. The title comes from what the activists shout at the workers as they go into the slaughterhouse, but with a running theme of half-hearted support being offered to the many cases of depression among the factory workers, and the activists only contributing to that, it feels like the accusation’s being laid at the target audience as much as anyone else.

Less successful is the subplot about Kostyantyn lying to his wife (Kateryna Hryhorenko) back in Ukraine about what he’s been doing for a living in the UK. It feels like an attempt to bring in a more global perspective that’s been left underdeveloped. Anastasia Bunce’s cast is completed by Jordan El-Balawi as a variety of slimy characters only too happy to patronize and sneer at Dan, so there’s an even-handedness here about the people adding to the pressure of an already unpleasant job. There’s a couple of clumsy touches here but overall subtler than you might expect from vegan agitprop but please, directors and sound designers I beg you, if you can’t afford more than a minute’s music maybe let the audience come in to eerie silence, don’t make them hate the play before the lights have even gone down*.

Blood On Your Hands by Grace Joy Howarth is booking until the 3rd of February at Southwark Playhouse Borough’s Little Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Charles Flint.

*it’s not just me being awkward, the group sitting next to me groaned louder every time the loop reset