Blunt instruments: Arts Radar & Griffin Independent’s Five Properties of Chainmale

Nicholas Hope’s Five Properties of Chainmale is described as a “confronting, uncomfortable and comical” examination of “modern man [as he] grapples with his crumbling reflection.” Despite the clumsy title, you could be forgiven for expecting a provocative and thought-provoking piece of theatre. What we get instead is clumsy, rather blunt, and dramaturgically confused, and never quite works out what it is trying to say.

Casual brutality: Griffin Independent & Stories Like These's Rust and Bone

The short stories by Canadian author Craig Davidson are not for the faint-hearted. In his collection of eight stories entitled Rust and Bone (also the title of the first story), there is a certain masculine façade, a swagger and bravado that is fiercely entertaining and quite alarmingly funny. There are boxers desperate to survive another round, their hands broken toomanytimes; pitbull breeders and killer whale trainers and sex addicts, their stories told with a bluntness that belies their strange brand of sensitivity. Chuck Palahniuk describes them as “[smudging] the line between cruelty and horror, comedy and mercy,” and that’s quite an accurate way to describe them.

From three of these stories, then, comes Caleb Lewis’ Rust and Bone currently playing at Griffin Theatre as part of their Griffin Independent season. It’s not a comfortable evening by any stretch, but it’s certainly not bleak; there is humour there but it’s confronting more than anything – are you meant to be laughing or not?