Leatherface

It’s every girlfriend’s nightmare: to come home, having been fired from your job, to find your man dressed up as the chief cannibal from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. After such an extravagantly shocking opening scene, one could be forgiven for expecting an hour of over-the-top silliness. Yet what ensues is a gripping and achingly poignant study of human desperation that confirms the continuing relevance of Helmut Krausser’s play, 15 years after its controversial Munich premiere.

Krausser’s text is loosely based on the final hours of Werner Bloy, killed by a German police sniper in 1986 after taking his girlfriend hostage. The chainsaw obsession of Krausser’s protagonist is a major embellishment of the facts of Bloy’s case, but by no means gratuitous. In a sensitive interpretation by Jim Townsend, the nameless figure’s preoccupation becomes a reflection of suburban desperation, a sympathetic vision of an introvert in crisis – matchstick cathedrals on steroids, if you will.

Pathetic and terrifyingly volatile in equal measure, Townsend’s performance is ably complemented by Sarah Brand, who gives a strong showing as his captive girlfriend. She a loud, unemployable alcoholic, he a shy, frustrated poet, the pair’s only common ground is their mutual unhappiness. It makes for moving—if thoroughly unconventional—romance, Brand’s character overcoming an initial terror of her unstable companion to join him in defiant opposition to the waiting police. If anything, her affection is a little too palpable: it’s hard to imagine anyone willingly falling into a violent captor’s arms quite so rapidly, Stockholm syndrome notwithstanding. Still, this is a powerful, genuinely unsettling production.