The State vs John Hayes

Tomorrow, Elyese Dukie will die. It’s Texas, 1959, and she’s on Death Row for murdering two people. But is she alone? Because looking out of the mirror (or so she claims) is John Hayes, the man who did it. And talking about him could mean the difference between psychiatric hospital and the executioner’s chair.

Actress Lucy Roslyn’s one-woman debut play has an intimate intensity devoid of histrionics. Based on research into female killers, it’s a gripping character study that never makes excuses for its subject but also refuses to pass easy judgements.

Sat on a bare bed, hair short and wearing a baggy, prison-issue denim shirt, Roslyn is spikily androgynous as Elyese. Her eyes glint and her rolling Southern accent slips into dry sarcasm as she promises to tell us the truth about John, flirts with us and challenges us in moments of cold anger.

It’s a multi-layered performance, riven with the pain of the outsider, shaded with awkward vulnerability and with a calculating edge as sharp as a shark’s smile. Elyese’s story is one of violent love and a life spent trying to fit into boxes made by others. The women she yearns for only want her as John.

The taut writing crackles with dark wit as Elyese imitates her stuttering lawyer, her father, her husband and her girlfriends, while painting a lurid picture of need and despair in her all-female prison wing. She pulls us in before making us doubt. How real is John? Roslyn lets the question hang in the air.