Review of the Week: Mass at the Donmar

Mass is at the Donmar, London, until 6 June

What does it mean to say that Fran Kranz’s play about the fallout from a school shooting feels relevant? Certainly it felt relevant in 2018, when Kranz began researching it after 17 people were shot dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Florida. It felt relevant in 2021, when Mass first appeared as a well-received film starring Jason Isaacs and Ann Dowd. Now its world premiere as a stage play, directed by Carrie Cracknell, brings to mind the inquiry into the Southport murders, which accused the killer’s parents of fatal complacency. Kranz, an actor turned writer, might long for the day when Mass is not relevant.

This is not a play to enter lightly. On press night, the Donmar’s stewards insisted that phones be turned off altogether to avoid the slightest buzz or chime. For the next 100 minutes, the audience’s silent concentration was almost eerie but for the occasional tearful sniffle. When the cast took their standing ovation, they still looked shellshocked, and no wonder.

Anna Yates’s set is a bright, bland Episcopal church in Middle America which looks, to British eyes, a lot like a primary school, right down to the children’s paintings on the glass partition wall. This is the neutral zone in which mediator Kendra (Rochelle Rose) has brought together two couples – Jay (Adeel Akhtar) and Gail (Lyndsey Marshal); Richard (Paul Hilton) and Linda (Monica Dolan) – for a conversation that is many years overdue. The couples are united by losing sons to a school shooting. The crucial distinction is that Jay and Gail’s boy Ethan was one of the victims whereas Richard and Linda’s teenager Hayden was the killer who then took his own life. Further divided by class and politics, the quartet are seeking to understand what happened, and whether forgiveness is possible. “We need to be able to listen to each other,” Linda says tentatively. “We don’t do that so much any more, do we?”

There is some welcome levity in the framing scenes of church staff members Judy (Susie Trayling) and Brandon (Amari Bacchus) tiptoeing around the gravity of the occasion (Are snacks appropriate? No snacks) – especially as Brandon is of an age to represent what the lost boys might have become. The body of the play, though, is one long real-time conversation around a table whose almost imperceptible revolutions track the shifting dynamics of the exchange. Akhtar leaping up to grab a bottle of water is as physical as it gets.

There are allusions to years of silence built up by lawsuits, media scrutiny and annihilating grief. This long-postponed reckoning begins in a mode of brittle, excessive politeness, vulnerable to one carelessly chosen word, but the couples can’t get anywhere until their courtesy cracks open and liberates their pain. Akhtar is such a naturally amiable actor that seeing him finally explode is like a smack in the face. The gaunt, angular Hilton breaks more chillingly as he details his son’s crimes with the precision of a coroner’s report. It’s left to the mothers to find common ground: Dolan neurotic with shame, Marshal tougher than she looks. Bar the fact that it’s almost impossible for Brits to sound persuasively American when speaking for this long, their tense chemistry is impeccable.

Understanding, we realise, is unattainable. Hayden remains a black box of inscrutable motives. Can they blame shoot-’em-up computer games? Online radicalisation? Reckless gun laws? A chemical imbalance? A failure of parenting? A sickness in the American bloodstream? Or just plain evil? Nothing satisfies. Worse, this was not an isolated tragedy. “Nothing has changed,” wails Gail. “I want it to mean something.” To move on – such a simple idea, so hard to achieve – is to let go of the idea that the massacre had a comprehensible narrative of cause and effect and to live, somehow, with the legacy of an inexplicably horrific act that might mean nothing at all. What they most want, and can never get, is for this never to have happened.

The grace that Mass ultimately achieves is extremely hard-won. Were it not, then the whole play would collapse into a pat homily. It is also a rather beautiful release from the pressure of talking it through. Kranz’s play is superbly acted, elegantly staged and immensely moving, but it is static, and oppressive, by design. Although Kranz was inspired by a documentary about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one now can’t help thinking of Punch, James Graham’s more dynamic exploration of restorative justice. When Gail sighs, towards the end, “I’m exhausted”, she prompts an odd laugh of relief.

Dorian Lynskey is the Nerve’s theatre critic. He co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story (and previously co-presented Remainiacs). His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize.