Dennis Kelly is no stranger to darker themes, so it comes as little surprise that his first play – now revived 10 years after its initial outing just down the road at Theatre 503 – opens with a blow by blow account of death by crucifixion. Undoubtedly its first audiences did not have the same benefit of expectation but, opening aside, Debris interestingly holds back on and sidesteps many of its potentially more brutal moments, and those which have characterised Kelly’s later work.
Being, as it is, a meditation of sorts on childhood, one wonders how much of Kelly’s own experience of Catholicism at a young age may have fed into the writing process for Debris; as there is an abstract fascination with the crucifixion process and a need to relate life experiences back to an empathetic, all knowing God. These subtle anchors aside, Debris very much finds itself out of time and out of place – it could be a British council estate anywhere, anytime that Michael (Harry McEntire) and Michelle (Leila Mimmack) find themselves growing (or rather dragging themselves) up in.
Drawing their fantasised lives on the concrete walls with chalk and quite literally constructing them from Signe Beckmann’s mass of rubble, McEntire and Mimmack are perfectly earnest, perfectly unreliable narrators, weaving a mixture of fantasy, reality and violence as they dart back and forth in a timeline of events that are never certain. Chalking her deceased mother onto every available surface with the perfect care and precision of a child, Mimmack’s physicality is captivating. Tense, yet fidgetingly forthright, she relays a constantly mutating account of her own birth and her mother’s death with all the certainty that 9 ¾ years can muster, all the while fastened to a rather sad balloon which bobs around dolefully in her wake.
McEntire’s Michael is altogether more sceptical, yet hopeful, of his place in the world, and his patter of thoughts runs away with him so often that he finds himself stumbling over and repeating them. Though the situations he pronounces are altogether more outlandish – his father’s self-crucifixion, finding a baby at the bottom of a rubbish chute and nursing it with his own blood – the veracity of his experience is much more difficult to read, thanks largely to McEntire’s wonderful ability to play on an awkward tenderness while allowing darker shades to creep in.
There is a brooding innocence in Debris, as neither child realises when they are on the verge of being trafficked into an abusive home after being tethered outside the pub like pets by their alcoholic father. Nor do they have a clear moral sense of the world; at one point Michael decides that “I have to kill you”, and duly attempts unsuccessfully to strangle his sister, which is afterwards not regarded by either party with any more concern or regret than would a normal game of rough and tumble.
Conversely, their hatred of their father is absolute, their depiction of him unforgiving, and when Michael finds the baby (which he names Debris in a moment of slightly overt dot connection) they go to every effort to conceal it from him. On finding their father transformed into a nurturing person when he discovers Debris in their flat, Michael cannot handle this new humanisation and calls social services to have the baby taken away.
Amidst the fantastical stretches – a vampire baby, a plant child and death by joy – and the gruesome almost-truths – a grossly alcoholic father and a cartoonish apelike thug – it is not only difficult to discern what is real and what is not, what is hell and what is home, but what Kelly is setting out to demonstrate. Is Debris an excoriation of council estates, of poverty, of abuse? Is it an expression of wonder at young people’s ability to piece a childhood together from whatever they are given? Abigail Graham’s deft direction gives what is quite a muscular text room for nuance, but ultimately the thrust of whatever it is that Kelly is trying to say has strayed somewhat within his own delivery. Or perhaps the conclusion was and is that we are simply a “squabbling mass of bipedal fury.”
