Random

Random by debbie tucker green, published by Nick Hern Books in this 2012 edition, is a short, sharp and devastating piece of contemporary British drama about an ordinary family experiencing the sort of news that divides life instantly into before and after.

At the centre of the play is the seemingly senseless killing of a Black schoolboy. What begins as an entirely unremarkable day — family routines, irritations, conversations and all the small domestic things nobody considers important while they are happening — is abruptly transformed when the police arrive with news that the family’s son has been killed. (Nick Hern Books)

Which is rather the point.

Most disasters do not have the decency to announce themselves with ominous music beforehand.

People get dressed.

They go to school.

They go to work.

They complain about somebody taking too long in the bathroom.

Then the telephone rings.

debbie tucker green builds the play out of the voices of the family, using everyday speech, repetition, rhythm and fragments of conversation to show how something incomprehensible enters an ordinary household.

The language is immediate and deliberately conversational. People do not suddenly start speaking like characters in a nineteenth-century tragedy simply because something terrible has happened to them.

They stumble.

They repeat themselves.

They concentrate on strange details.

They say ordinary things because ordinary language is all they have.

And somehow that makes the extraordinary event considerably harder to escape.

The original stage production was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2008, with Nadine Marshall performing the characters in a one-woman staging. The work was later adapted for Channel 4 television, where it won the BAFTA for Best Single Drama. (Nick Hern Books)

This 2012 Nick Hern Books edition gives readers the play on the page, where its unusual rhythms and fractured dialogue become particularly apparent.

It is one of those texts that looks deceptively sparse.

There are no enormous historical settings.

No invading armies.

No collapsing empires.

No conveniently villainous character wandering onstage to explain everything.

Just a family and an absence.

Yet the emotional territory is enormous.

The title Random is brutally effective because it captures the terror behind the story: the possibility that catastrophe may not come with a satisfying explanation.

Human beings are tremendously fond of causes.

We like motives.

We like beginnings, middles and ends.

We particularly like being able to say, “That happened because…”

Random violence is offensive partly because it refuses to provide that comfort.

The play also examines the wider reality of youth violence without turning its characters into statistics.

A newspaper headline can reduce a death to an age, a location and a few lines of copy.

A family cannot.

For them there are bedrooms, clothes, habits, arguments, jokes, unfinished plans and all the evidence of somebody who was expected to come home.

That difference between public event and private catastrophe is where much of the play’s power lies.

There is humour here too, because real families are funny even on days that later become unbearable.

The ordinary family exchanges at the beginning give the characters life before grief arrives to redefine everything.

That makes the humour human rather than comic relief.

It also ensures that when the mood changes, it changes properly.

For students of modern drama, contemporary British theatre, performance, social issues or the writing of debbie tucker green, Random is a compact but powerful text.

It is also a useful reminder that page count is not a reliable indication of emotional weight.

Some enormous novels say very little.

Some slim plays quietly hit you with a brick.

Condition: Good. A sound used copy with normal signs of previous reading and handling. The book remains perfectly suitable for study, performance, annotation or sitting on a syllabus looking considerably less dangerous than it actually is.

ISBN: 9781848421059.

A powerful modern play about family, sudden loss and the terrible disruption caused when an apparently normal day becomes something else entirely.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where occasionally the thin books are the ones that weigh the most.

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