Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat is Mark Ravenhill's epic cycle of plays exploring the personal and political effect of war on modern life, produced in various locations around London in April 2008.
Mark Ravenhill (born 7 June 1966) is an English playwright, actor and journalist.
His plays include Shopping and Fucking (first performed in 1996), Some Explicit Polaroids (1999) and Mother Clap's Molly House (2001). He made his acting debut in his monologue Product, at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He often writes for the arts section of The Guardian. He is Associate Director of London's Little Opera House at The King's Head Theatre.
For years I have been labouring under the misapprehension that Lord of The Flies and The Name of The Rose are the worst texts in English literature. Then I read this.
In this play, Ravenhill examines the huge and the small impact war brings upon people regardless of their profession, sex, marital status, age or sexuality. Its force is destructive and its purpose is usually embellished by long lost ideals which during wartime can only come out as utopian. The violence is always there and not as much physically as I had expected. But the fragmentary stories the characters share are dreadful enough to be brutal.
Personally, I couldn't like the play however hard I tried. The repetitions were annoying to me even though I could identify their function. But the play was excessively lengthy and nearly full of anonymity which again was purposeful but still incredibly tiresome.
Saw a production with eight of these scenes. Horribly written, nonsensical and way too focused on men sexually exploiting women, who the writer clearly doesn't understand and who are largely presented only in relation to their children or partners. By the third scene, my partner and I were seriously considering if we could climb over the back of the seats to escape, and not because of the heaviness of the material but because the writing was unbearable.