Written for Culture Wars“I know what I’m doing,” Katie keeps telling us. But beneath her veil of sexuality and bluster, the eighteen year-old is nothing but a rabbit caught in the headlights.
Jack Thorne’s monologue starts with a splat. Walking through grey old Luton, Katie’s older boyfriend Abe drops his ice-cream when a boy on a bicycle careers into him. That sparks a chain of escalating retaliation, in which the thrill of the chase quickly supersedes the disrespects felt. Before long an impromptu pack is trailing the perpetrator all the way to his bedroom door.
Caught in the middle, out of her depth but refusing to let slip, is Rosie Wyatt’s bittersweet Katie: a girl incapable of folding her cards. Even when forced to remove her knickers in the passenger seat of a Vauxhall Astra, one breast hanging out of her school shirt, she remains front-footed, calling the bluff of those affronting her. It’s not difficult to see how the cycle spirals out of proportion. Two wrongs, she says, have managed to make a right.
Wyatt relates events, amongst a cyclone of tangential offshoots, in relentless jabber of information. Her tone swings between warped pride, defensiveness and borderline self-loathing. For all that she’s a likeable presence, you register that Wyatt is roughing it. Katie’s harshness doesn’t come naturally and she’s missing the volatility to set you on edge.
Nonetheless, she’s brilliant at coaxing out the more sympathetic side of Thorne’s text, which steers clear of easy condemnation. Bunny never peers down its nose at its characters, though it reserves a special scorn for Luton as a place. However, the spite of Thorne’s descriptions isn’t carried by the cutesy design, in which Jenny Turner’s cartoonish outlines are projected behind Katie. Smart, pressing and credible, but there’s more bite to Bunny than Joe Murphy’s production allows.
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