Simon Ward reviews Bloody Bloody Kansas at the Hen and Chickens Theatre

Conceived, written and directed by Heidi Van, who also plays the roles of Ma Bender and Mary York, this is clearly a work driven by a passionate interest in its subject matter from a Kansas City-based company. In the late nineteenth century, the US government was offering 160 acres of farmland to anyone willing to build a house and till the soil on their allotted plot. The Great Osage Trail was long and treacherous, a fact exploited by a notorious family of serial killers, the Bloody Benders – Ma (Heidi Van), Pa (Bob Paisley), John Junior (Vanessa A. Davis) and Kate (Katie Gilchrist). They would lure their victims either with the promise of a last taste of home comforts before the full rigour of the trail, or by enticing them with the prospect of contacting lost loved ones from beyond the grave. However they arrived, their end would be nasty, brutish and short. There were so many hazards along the Trail, the disapperance of the occasional traveller would barely arouse suspicion. That is until, one day, it did…

This is an intriguing premise, and introduces a UK audience to a story from the early days of the American West which is not well-known here. Unfortunately, it is not clear what the piece is trying to say. We remain in the dark as to the motives for the killings – although the victims are robbed it seems that some of them possess little of value. Although there is a suggestion that John Junior, in particular, may have been motivated by sheer sadism, it is not really followed through.

The acting is uniformly excellent, and the use of shadows to portray the murders is gruesomely effective, but the play seems to finish too soon. The 45 minutes or so provide us with the outline of a tale but we are never sufficiently engaged either with the murderers or their victims. If the crimes are more or less motiveless and the victims unknown to us, there is nothing to hook the audience into the story. There is an attempt to suggest that the family escape to continue their evil-doing elsewhere, but even this somehow fails to have the intended chilling effect. If it is meant as horror or thriller it is neither horrific nor thrilling enough. If it is neither of these, we need to see the characters develop; we need to gain an understanding of what makes them tick, rather than simply witnessing their skullduggery.

It is, though, disquieting to consider that even in its earliest years, American society was disfigured by the kind of psychopathic violence we see here. The spirit of optimism and hope that drove the pioneers to seek their fortunes on the likes of the Great Osage Trail, could also be mutilated and disfigured by the brutality and corruption of people like the Benders.

Bloody Bloody Kansas is running as part of the Camden Fringe at the Hen and Chickens Theatre, 109 St Pauls Road, London N1 2NA until Saturday 2nd August.