Review of Pilot Theatre's play Catcher in The Times, 27 May 2010
Despite suffering for its ambition, this account of John Lennon’s murderer the day before the crime remains provocative.
He got his way in the end. The puny brought down the mighty and, through a single act of hostility, an unemployed 25-year-old from Texas painted upon himself enigma and immortality. Thirty years later, we’re still trying to fathom Mark Chapman, the devotee of J.D. Salinger and killer of John Lennon. The legend clearly has too much dramatic currency to resist and York Theatre Royal’s resident company, Pilot Theatre, has chosen to revisit it four months after Salinger’s death.
Chapman carried Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye with him at all times and “became” the novel’s protagonist, Holden Caulfield. He saw it as his duty to seek out “phonies” - and to him Lennon was the ultimate phoney.
The writer Richard Hurford imagines how Chapman spent the day before the shooting, holed up in a downmarket New York hotel. In a bid to emulate Holden Caulfield, he calls up a prostitute and it is the dialogue between the pair that forms the play. The device allows for an intensive study of the psychopathic mind. Suitably bug-eyed, Ronan Summers as Chapman relates the twisted rationale for the murder he is about to commit, by turns gentle and cajoling and then fuming, mad at the world.
Summers plays Chapman with gusto but is a good deal more preppy and better-looking than the podgy misfit who murdered the former Beatle. Across the bed, Sunny (Mitzi Jones) falls in and out of his spell but is there primarily to be raged at. As no-one has ever tracked down the real Sunny, Jones is able to conjure her own creation, which is primarily a fine study in indifference. The chemistry between the pair is competent but never quite combustible.
The one-act play is short at 90 minutes and the director Suzann McLean brings to it fine pacing and a puppy-like enthusiasm. Chapman’s impending break-up and blowout, however, might have been better played more slowly, stoking up the menace. This would allow the vital subtexts - martyrdom, iconography and the cult of death - to breathe in and out of the story with a more even rhythm.
The odd bouts of proselytising on celebrity and the attempts to contemporise the story (Sunny reads aloud to the audience titbits from a modern day gossip magazine) are unnecessary and too often pierce the script, disarming the tension. McLean has perhaps tried to say too much, too loudly but the piece, despite suffering for its ambition, remains provocative and robust.
Box office: 01904 623568, to 5 June 2010. www.pilot-theatre.com
See also JD Salinger: A Life Raised High by Kenneth Slawenski, published by Pomona Books.