Fregmonto Stokes’ Kill The PM is a darkly comic political thriller, cold-blooded, just not in the way you’d expect. In the abandoned building we occupy Peter (Michael McStay) peers anxiously onto the street below from behind closed curtains. In less than an hour the Prime Minister’s motorcade will drive past and Peter – or one of the small crew he has assembled – will shoot to kill from on high.
In blocked colours, combat boots and glasses (Dylan James Tonkin’s costumes and drop-sheet-draped set are great) Pete looks every bit the student revolutionary, slippery and hard to read with an almost infallible confidence.
With motives presented as vague rhetoric there’s a disconnect between what we see on stage and what is, apparently, driving this drastic action. Both Naomi (Lily Newbury-Freeman) and Flick (Zoe Jensen) feel underdeveloped – as a result Flick’s transformation from quiet hippy seems without precedent, while Naomi is in danger of only upping a potential body count that feels inevitable.
Nicholas Hiatt steals the show as wild-card Rowan, the idiosyncratic clichés heaped on fringe-dwellers, on the politically dissatisfied, are blown marvellously out of proportion in him, but Naomi manages to keep it from being simply farce. The play is at its best when seen through his eyes.
Kill The PM, Old 505 Theatre to 26 Oct.
