Milli Bhatia on the Seven Methods Of Killing Kylie Jenner

Cleo (played by Leanne Henlon), photo credit: Myah Jeffers

The first time I heard the title of this play, I was obviously intrigued. There’s something about the violence it depicts that pulls you toward it – not particularly the violence towards Kylie Jenner, but the directness of the title. There’s the need to avoid any kind of censorship with this explicit title - allow misinterpretation if need be because, quite frankly, how often are white people afforded the luxury of making an error of judgement.

 But the story isn’t actually a re-enactment of Jenner’s murder, it’s about so much more.

This story is about the pain Black women face by the capitalist and white supremacist systems that govern our every day. We hear from Cleo (played by Leanne Henlon) and Kara (played by Tia Bannon) as they discuss the ramifications about tweeting frustrations as a Black woman, toward a white woman; instigated by the Forbes tweet calling Kylie Jenner a “self made billionaire”.

Interestingly, a couple of months later, Forbes went back on that statement and said that she in fact was not a billionaire: it was a “web of lies” created by the family about how much she sold her cosmetics brand for - but no real mention on the “self made” statement. Nonetheless, the damage was done and what it did was lay bare the wealth inequality from profiting specifically off Blackness.

This was the first full-length play written by the talented Jasmine Lee-Jones, winning the play numerous accolades, including most promising playwright at both the Critics’ Circle and Evening Standard awards. She has written and performs in her new play Curious at the Soho Theatre.

Watching the play as a queer South Asian woman was an experience in itself, and I suppose this play does that for every intersect that you sit in - whether you’re Black, queer, Asian, white, straight - there is a different feeling you will receive at different times. When I found out that the play was directed by South Asian powerhouse Milli Bhatia, it became clear that we needed to discuss the elements within the play and how we profit off anti-Blackness ourselves.

Thank you so much Milli, for taking the time to speak to Burnt Roti! Can you tell me a bit about how this project came to you?

I was the trainee director at the Royal Court Theatre, and Jasmine (Lee-Jones) had written a ten minute piece called Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner. It was just an outstanding piece of writing. When I came onboard as director, we started developing it six months before we went into rehearsals, and Jasmine was then in with the actors everyday, so it also developed a lot through rehearsals. It’s such a privilege to be able to discover new writing with the writer in this way. 

That was the first time we did it. The second time, there had been more space and time to investigate it, and to ask what it means to put on the play now, because the world is so profoundly different. The themes in this play: centring black women and the conversation it has with the audience felt like it needed more thinking from me, about what it meant for the audience and how we wanted the audience to receive it in 2021. We couldn’t present it like we did in 2019, we had to reinvestigate it and ask the big questions again, and that was such a privilege. 

It’s set in 2019, but it’s extraordinary to come back to it now in this world and see how important everything in the play still is and how urgently this conversation still needs to happen. After the renewed conversation around Black Lives Matter following the murder of George Floyd, some of our audience are going to receive this play in a different way. In some ways I celebrate that, and in some ways I don’t – why did it take this to wake us up?

Mili Bhatia, photo credit: Helen Murray

I understand celebrating the conversation, but not celebrating how it has happened. Do you think people are listening finally?

I think it has a poignancy, a different level of listening now. I count myself in that as a South Asian woman, directing this play about Black women – this play is about anti-Blackness. It asks us to consider our complicity in anti-Blackness and that is something that I include myself in. Especially in the responsibility that comes with directing this play.

I think in some ways that has been useful as a director, to be outside the experience and be part of the audience’s conversation.

I just want to say I love the title and how curious it makes people.

The thing is, on face value, it can be taken out of context. What you learn in the play is that the seven methods are about examining Kylie’s complicity in anti-Blackness and how she has been able to capitalise off, as Cleo says in the play, “stealing Black women’s sauce and reselling it to the world, like this shit’s new”.  The methods of killing her are actually examples of brutality used against Black people. Cleo has reframed this, in order to “kill Kylie Jenner”.

Now a main feature on the play is the Internet, how important was it to you to reflect the internet as an activist’s forum?

We made a very particular choice about how the internet is represented. When using Twitter as a platform for her activism, Cleo says, “I’m finally being heard”. She recognises it is a platform where she has agency, a voice and reaches people who usually don’t listen to her. I’ve been thinking about that because for the past two years, activism has largely had to exist online. During The Farmer’s Protest in India, for example, some activists were detained by police because of what they were putting out on the internet, they recognised it as a tool to have a wider conversation.

Clubhouse was a platform that was connecting me to people during the pandemic, and I used it to educate myself and understand what was happening. As a Punjabi woman I felt so disconnected from the world and in particular, what was happening in India.

I do think we interact with the internet in a different way now and I wonder if the language in the play feels different to the audience, even though the playtext is largely as it was in 2019. The censorship of activists online and backlash of people who use platforms for their politics, especially marginalised communities – made me really think about the play. The play taps into the cognitive dissonance many experience regarding the recognition that our words online have real life consequences.

The language was amazing and sometimes it was hard to remember acronyms, to keep up with what they were saying, which I suppose is like how quickly the internet moves! How was the journey of writing it and interpreting it into the play?

There’s a stage direction from Jasmine that states: “Kara and Cleo begin to glitch”. That’s a meeting of both worlds – the internet and IRL, they then begin to adopt acronyms and memes in the IRL space. We approached it like another language. Both worlds of the play were meticulously interrogated with the design team, in order to discover how they are established and then begin to bleed into one another. In terms of the way the internet is conceived, in 2019 and before the pandemic, I was reading a lot about Memetic Theory, which borrows from Darwinian evolution theory and suggests that memes behave as genes do. It was here that I was introduced to the comparison of the movement, reproduction, spread and reappropriation of a tweet as to that of a virus. They compete in means of survival and are reappropriated according to the host. In the models of epidemiology, memes are the cultural equivalent of flu, spread through the equivalent of a sneeze. We considered the internet in this play as sentient, the ever present, third character in the play that swallows them up and spits them out. As the threat of the internet and volume of tweets grow, they begin to adopt this language themselves (like a virus); they glitch. 

The movement director Delphine Gaborit and I were interested as the body as a host, so the movement language was inspired by that idea – they adopt and code-switch into another meme, gif or tweet. 

We didn’t want to demonise the people behind troll accounts, we wanted to explore them as real people – and I feel we are often so desensitised to online abuse because there’s so much of it. The brilliance of Jasmine’s writing is that the violence and insidious nature of the language creeps up on you because the tweets are hilarious. On face value they seem inoffensive. This informed the way we thought about how it exists in the actor’s bodies and the journey of the twitterludes throughout the production.

Cleo (played by Leanne Henlon) and Kara (played by Tia Bannon), photo credit: Myah Jeffers

The set design and the way it was put together and movements, I wa scared of blinking in case I missed something. But, I wanted to talk about that tree – what was the reasoning behind it? It created some emotions in some people, but what was it for you?

I wouldn’t want to lead someone as what it ‘should’ or was ‘supposed’ to mean..., I love that there are lots of different interpretations and it’s been perceived to mean many different things by audiences.

It feels living and breathing, it feels alive, and its presence grows throughout the production. Whatever you saw it as, is how it’s meant to be perceived and whatever the feeling was for different people, the sense it was sentient was what was important for us.

It’s a huge testament to Rajha Shakiry the designer, Elena Peña the sound designer and Jessica Hung Han Yun and Amy Mae the lighting designers, that you are transported through so many different, immersive worlds without any set changes or props. And the movement direction by Delphine Gaborit, as the physical shifts really guide you through the worlds they stand in when they begin to bleed together. This was a really collaborative process, and all the minds of these brilliant women are the foundation of the vision for this production.

 How do you feel as a South Asian woman doing play about Blackness?

I position myself in my work the same way I do in a lot of my politics, and that’s as an ally. But as a director I feel it’s important you don’t centre yourself in the conversation or work, you’re there to facilitate a safe creative space and I was always clear about this not being my direct experience. It’s also something I really want our community to engage with.  

Were there moments, you had to question yourself and your past?

The conversation the play is having and accountability it asks for shouldn’t not include me just because I’m a PoC, we must all interrogate our actions and complicity in anti-Blackness. I think about the vital conversations many of us have had with people in our community. It’s important that just because we’re not white, we don’t allow ourselves to think it doesn’t extend to us or that we’re somehow separate from the conversation – we’re not. Our community has a lot to face in terms of anti-Blackness.

seven methods of killing kylie jenner is set to be released on screen in the near future, and will be on tour in The US in spring 2022. A Swedish production directed by Milli Bhatia premieres in Autumn 2022.