Monday 22 April 2013

Cannibals at The Royal Exchange


Manchester playwright Rory Mullarkey’s first full-length play Cannibals defies definition.

I went into the theatre knowing very little about the production. All I had to go on was the title, which suggests taboo-smashing content of the, almost certainly, disturbing variety; the poster – enigmatic, stark but possibly a bit pretentious in that sort of minimalist arty way; and the tagline – “Death, Love and Consumerism in the 21st Century.”


One hour and 50 minutes later, after a tense, interval-less, sensory, emotional and intellectual assault, I left the Royal Exchange feeling a little dazed and shell-shocked, not quite sure where I was or how I felt about what I had just seen.

So, how to describe Cannibals? Well, the tagline is actually a good starting point. Yes, people love and yes, people die. In the very first scene, for example, a man tells his wife the many reasons why he loves her, only to be shot dead minutes later. 

But of the three themes laid out in the tagline, consumerism is the most integral.

In the developed Western world, consumerism refers almost exclusively to the buying of things – our endless need to populate our homes and lives with Stuff. It’s why we have supermarkets: those great bastions of modern society that seem to stock twenty different types of everything, from shampoo, to cigarettes, to tinned beans, to loo roll. In short, choice is king... but I often find myself wondering just how luxurious or unique tissue paper needs to be to fulfil its primary bum-wiping function.

Consumerism in the remote post-Soviet region in which the play opens, however, is a much simpler and more visceral affair. The consumers in this society are peasants, and their main want and need in life is simply having enough to eat, to survive the long and cold winter. It’s a place where desperation turns people against one other – a brutal, bleak, dog-eat-dog, human-eat-dog/horse/badger/even human world.

Mullarkey’s play roots us in the latter, ostensibly alien world of peasant farmers and war and economic hardship, of remote villages and old crones and holy fools and one-eyed icon painters.

Our way in to this world, our human conduit, is Lizaveta, a young woman whose husband is murdered, victim to a nameless war.


Lizaveta, played with great energy and passion by Ony Lihiara, must run for her life. She finds temporary refuge with a cantankerous, gun-wielding old woman (the brilliantly deadpan Tricia Kelly) who puts her to work in the fields. Here, she befriends Josef, a simple but good-hearted fool (Ricky Champ) and a painter, Vitalik (Simon Armstrong).

But soon, war and opportunism intrude once again on Lizaveta’s life, and through forces beyond her control, she finds herself transported across Europe to a strange, grotesque, bewildering place – Manchester, our world, which, through Lizaveta’s eyes, no longer looks as comfortingly familiar.


I’m not sure if it’s possible for me to say you will enjoy this show, in the same way you may not enjoy watching a dissection. It’s original and compelling, certainly, but also provocative, brutal, bleak and disturbing.

“Appreciate” is perhaps a better word, but whether you appreciate Cannibals will probably depend on what you feel theatre is meant to do.

If you think theatre’s prime purpose is only to entertain, to provide two hours of respite from the daily grind, to envelop the audience in a gentle web of feel-good escapism – then this production is not for you.

But if you believe theatre has the power to explore and interrogate difficult ideas and concepts, to take you on a discomfiting but powerful emotional journey, to make you reconsider your beliefs and your worldview, or to shake you out of a complacency you may not have even realised you had, then Cannibals is definitely worth seeing.

You may not necessarily enjoy it, but if you find that you see things a little differently when you leave the theatre than you did when you first arrived – as I did – then Mullarkey should feel proud to have done his job.

Cannibals continues at the Royal Exchange Theatre, St Ann’s Square, Manchester until Saturday 27 April 2013

Get £10 tickets through Manchester Confidential here.

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