THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Fran Kranz
Donmar Warehouse, 41 Earlham Street, Seven Dials, London WC2H 9LX until June 6, 2026
The premise here couldn’t be more simple or more innately theatrical – four people sitting round a table talking. It depicts the meeting between two sets of grieving parents, one whose son was the shooter and one the victim of a high school shooting. It’s the debut play from LA-born actor/writer Fran Kranz, based on his debut screenplay. The remarkable 2021 movie won Ann Dowd a BAFTA film nomination. Transposed to the intimacy of the Donmar Warehouse it reaches a level of microscopic intensity which is almost overpowering.
Before the parents enter the beige meeting room in the light filled basement of an Episcopal church we meet two employees, Judy and Brandon, who prepare the room, nervously fussing over the placement of the table and whether there should be tissues and water, and we see their panic when they notice children’s rainbow paintings on the wall and ponder whether to remove them. It’s all kid gloves, overseen by Kendra (Rochelle Rose), a counselor who has brought the parents together with a view to initiating some healing and/or sense of closure.
Carrie Cracknell’s delicately assured direction holds the audience rapt throughout. It takes place in real time, and she gets the pacing just right from the initial pregnant pauses, to the therapeutic platitudes as the four exchange awkward niceties. Very soon though the defenses fall away and it’s like a dam bursting: “Why do I want to know about your son? Because he killed mine!” exclaims the victim’s mother Gail (a brilliant Lyndsey Marshal), the more brittle of the four.
One of the great takeaways from the play is about the deadly hand of lawyers with their civil lawsuits which clamp down on any communication between the parents that might have perhaps aided understanding and joint grieving. There is too much money at stake, however, in our litigious world. The shooter’s parents have, of course, been ostracised and besieged with threats and hate mail.
To pull off something this delicate you need accomplished actors at the top of their game and we get them here. Double BAFTA winner Adeel Akhtar plays Jay, the victim’s father, naturally affable but a defeated soul in terms of trying to contain his fury. The great Paul Hilton plays the killer’s father, Richard, a prim, formal, businessman, trying to hold it together for his wife, fully acknowledging his critics but unable to comprehend what happened.
The play tenderly explores with great insight the limits of parenthood and how anyone can be held fully ‘responsible’ for the actions of a teenage offspring who gets radicalized, and in this it couldn’t be timelier. It focuses well, too, on a rather unfortunate modern obsession with parenting as if it’s some sort of science of management (‘you didn’t follow the formula and look what happened’) as if that makes any sense for anyone who knows teenagers, or in the context of alienation and social media radicalization.
The core of the piece is Monica Dolan’s Linda (the shooter’s mother). She is wound so tightly for this encounter she can barely sit straight and then she shakes as she tries to explain how she still has love for the son who evolved into a mass killer. Gail pushes her, rather cruelly, for examples from his youth of when he might have been weird or odd; she offers up what she can, wracked in pain.
In the end the big questions here are of course unknowable – how did they not know?, who is to blame? – and the play asks if blame is even a helpful concept here.
The fifth character in this play is the astonishing design by Anna Yates. Throughout, the table at which they are seated and which appeared to have been casually positioned, revolves imperceptibly, and you can’t see the edges. Guy Hoare’s lighting focuses or dims as if to provide close ups – the perfect translation of something so filmic.
This is a deeply human piece about the messy business of forgiveness, achieved with consummate artistry. The apparent bleakness should not put anyone off as it’s a masterclass in great acting too.
