21 – 25 March
What, in it’s first twenty minutes or so, seemed to me to be a mere piece of fluff about ‘80s influencers – before influencers or indeed social media was a thing – turned out to have a dark heart and the dark heart in turn had a thinking head. Yes, it’s a musical full of surprises.
The ‘Heathers’ in question are a trio of girls, all named Heather, in their final year at Westerberg High School, where the greatest currency is popularity and the most popular girl is Heather Chandler (Verity Thompson). Heather Chandler suffers from a superfluity of confidence, which she uses for no good purpose other than to ruin the lives of others who she mocks and looks down upon. Her motto could be, ‘Why walk when you can strut?’ Hoping to get into the clique of Heathers is Veronica Sawyer (Jenna Innes) a thoughtful girl who simply wants some fun and acceptance in her final year at school. Veronica soon falls under the spell of the misanthropic ‘J.D.’ (Jacob Fowler) and unwittingly finds herself an accessory to the murder of Chandler. J.D. persuades Veronica to concoct evidence to make the death look like suicide. After an attempted rape by two ‘Jocks’, Veronica again finds herself an accessory to their murder by J.D. who has the twisted notion of cleansing society of what he considers its bad people. Before J.D. can carry out his plan for a supposed mass suicide at the school, Veronica sees the light and J.D. blows himself up.
As a dark corrective to the often sunny and lovelorn ‘coming of age’ films turned out by Hollywood, this stage adaption by Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe based on the cinematic original by Daniel Waters pulls together several strands of thought, for example; the need to belong and have acceptance, the potentially harmful psychological effects of one’s upbringing, the American class system, the susceptibility of teenagers to malign influences that can play on their insecurities, the moral gulf that separates outward show from inner strength. Again, darkly comic is the power of tragedy to effect change and the release of repressions when the two homophobic fathers of the dead Jocks come out of the closet with cleverly ironic, “I never cared for homos much until I reared me one”.
When one has a variety of themes to choose from in summing up a play, the chances are it is about a whole toxic culture and so it is with Heathers. The musical numbers point up some of the themes and work well, being entertaining whilst developing the characters without holding up the movement of the plot and are a mixture of darkly romantic, witty and surreal as when Chandler’s corpse gets up to sing and bask in her undeserved eulogies.
American high school killings, if not a defining characteristic of that great nation, are nonetheless something more than a passing blip in its recorded history. Heathers offers a wry look at an apparently intractable problem and reminds us that the people involved in these tragedies are after all merely teenagers.
★★★★☆ Graham Wyles 22 March 2023
Photo credit: Pamela Raith
