Gruesome Playground Injuries, The Gate Theatre, London.

Love Hurts, love scars, love wounds; Gram Parson once warbled at many a High School last dance. Perhaps he was also playing at the prom of self destructive lovers Kayleen and Doug before they found themselves in the sick room picking at the one of many love wounds found in Rajiv Joseph's heartbreaking tale of the bloody leading the bloody, 'Gruesome Playground Injuries'.
Yet whilst Gram's scars are merely metaphorical, their wounds are also literal and garish, as we examine them under the clinical blue lighting of Lily Arnold's brilliant white plastic set. Doug, a high school jock with a penchant for Evil Kneival inspired stunts appears to come off worst, yet it's Kayleen whose more invisible scars run deeper. Both leads are intensely watchable, physical performers, who in the opening scenes embody their characters with an energy almost as overbearing as the set, but as the leads move back and forth through time and gradually start reaching a clumsy maturity, the intensity and speed is replaced by a coiled sadness which is just as engaging and somehow more believable then the initial high octane exchanges. The elongated scene changes, instead of dragging, were both beautifully devised and integral to the story. In a similar vein to last years Wild Swans at the Young Vic, they revealed the complex fondness the characters felt for one another when apart. Doug's ease as he accepts the wounds that Kayleen paints with complicity on to his hands and face, compared with the reluctant painting of his own missing tooth later on, or the smiles that show the underlying love for each other which disappear but linger when the dialogue begins, all help to reveal the self reliance in their relationship and the sense of comfort which kept bringing them back together. After seeing her paint it on, the memory of the scar on Kayleen's stomach, which lies unmentioned under her pyjamas, hangs ominously over the scene. The abruptly severed ending was perhaps the only off note of the play but it did not spoil time spent in the company of these two damaged lives and was consistent in its resistance to provide an easy solution to human's hellbent capacity for self inflicted suffering.