Billy the Kid eats his cereal to the sound of live punk rock and then shoots his mum for trying to make him go to school. The red and white polka dot kitchen of suburban America is contrasted with corpses, dominatrix leather and massive guns. The show sets out to be utterly outrageous, where everything is open to every kind of insult and offence. If you are easily shocked then it will horrify you and if you are bored and disaffected it will provoke you. After Billy has killed his mother, he finds that cleaning up the mess he caused proves to be more of a chore than going to school. Naturally the most offensive thing to do would be to make a teenage pizza delivery girl live inside the decomposing corpse to blag their way past a horny father and an image obsessed ultra-cop. Meanwhile the mother is being turned into a man hating soldier for an army of lesbian feminist angels planning their vengeance on living men. People are generally so busy being shocked by events such as the presence onstage of a screaming aborted foetus and necrophilia that it is hard to see exactly what this show aims to achieve. It professes to have a focus on satire which is plainly directed against the world of gated American communities. While this is a championed aim of the show it is not the defining character of the performance that comes across. Its prime motivation is to be something that breaks the mould of structured inoffensive theatre. This is not done in a pretentious theatre boffins manner but appears as a petulant adolescent explosion. A show of this style needs a lot of justification, because if it simply sets out to be outrageous at all costs without a strong underlying reason then everything it is doing is facile. That justification best finds itself in the words of the writer, who declares that he was bored. It worked as an excuse for punk rock and it will be interesting to see if it works for this type of reactionary theatre. You would be foolish to go into the show thinking its great because it challenges boundaries and uses biting satire against those pesky Americans. This is a frantic and basic reaction to boredom that unleashes pent up energy in an extravaganza of outrage that aims to provoke.
