Vernon God Little, Young Vic

A whiff of excrement hangs around DBC Pierre’s Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little. It’s a novel that likes to get right up into the crevices of society and then inhale deeply. Written in an anarchic, freewheeling American patois, it’s the inner voice of Vernon himself (and Pierre’s brutal way with a simile) that plays shock and awe with the reader, delighting many and appalling more. The loss of narrative voice would seem enough to deter any would-be theatrical adaptor, but in 2007 Tanya Ronder and the Young Vic took up the challenge. The result (newly revised) now makes a return – shotgun in one hand, the other down its trousers.

“I went to Martirio and all I got was this lousy exit wound.” Vernon Gregory Little is having a bad day. His best (and only) friend got caught in ladies’ underwear, went on a killing rampage at their high school, then shot himself. Students and teachers are dead and everyone’s blaming Vernon. And then there’s the small matter of his bowel “inconvenience”.

Delighting in the gun oil and fried-chicken grease stench of the white-trash South, DBC Pierre’s atmosphere clings intrusively. Rufus Norris’s production gestures toward this haphazard squalor with his deconstructed set; sofas, shopping trolleys and office chairs become cars with the simple addition of a fluorescent steering wheel or an elaborately decorated windscreen. Sets and props are mounted on wheels, sidling onto stage or manoeuvring as needed, facilitating the fractured, fast-paced chaos of Act One. Yet for all its makeshift ingenuity, there’s something a bit too clean about everything. Perhaps it’s the necessarily minimal approach, but nothing really has that sweat-stained, sauce-spilled, lived-in patina that you’d expect.

The cast don’t help matters by being altogether too thin and good-looking. Some of Pierre’s most inventive language is lavished on the paunchy flesh-spill of the Martirio ladies and their domestic aspirations (the fabled “almond on almond” fridge makes only a cameo appearance), and while the vulgarity is successfully underplayed, this dramatic restraint surely requires some counterbalance in the visuals.

Ronder’s work is scrupulously faithful, favouring original dialogue where at all possible. The result feels more like a reorganisation than a true adaptation, with changes and additions largely worked into the show’s direction. Most striking is the country and western score that has been extrapolated from the book. The cast (in patented Young Vic style) prove themselves adept on any number of instruments – singing, playing and line-dancing with slickly choreographed ease. The courtroom scene degenerates into a surreal country opera, presided over by Johnnie Fiori’s glorious soul diva of a judge.

Following the original production’s success, the Young Vic have once again chosen a Vernon making his professional debut. In his portrait of the modern picaresque hero (whose idols are Eminem, Kanye West and the like) Joseph Drake (pictured above with Lily James as Taylor) lurches from zeal to cringe, a swaggering rapper whose heroic destiny melts under the corrosive drip of society. It’s a shockingly assured performance, carrying the show through its (overlong) three-hour duration.

While I didn’t quite feel the rage of the mother-son dynamic, Clare Burt’s damaged Doris is pathetic and horrific in equal measure, balanced by the sunny block capitals of Fiori’s Pam. Taking on both of Vernon’s women – the feral Ella and milk-fed beauty Taylor – Lily James also impressed, though perhaps most in the winsome directness of the former.

It’s a tough book in so many ways, but the problem that lingers most pervasively in this adaptation is one of tone. The rather complicated denouement thwarts any attempt to cut characters, leading to a hectic, headlong rush of an expositionary first half. Atmosphere is matter-of-fact (not aided by one of Norris’s few additions – the silent role of dead shooter Jesus with his guitar) and doesn’t quite square with the extravagant operatic pathos cultivated in Act Two. Part of the fault does admittedly lie with Pierre; JM Coetzee has already done the God/Dog thing and with more artistry. The sudden turn to quasi-religious catharsis feels insufficiently prepared.

Martirio is, after all, a world where the two forces underlying all life are not good and evil but “cause and effect”, where folk are “bothered” by the shootings but not stirred to either anger or compassion. An exhilarating anti-parable for a post-religious age, Vernon God Little preaches obscenity and wit from a neon plastic pulpit. Irreverent and energetic, Norris and Ronder have fashioned a plausible production, lacking only perhaps the urgency that spurts prematurely from Pierre’s novel.