Vault Chapter 02 — Screech’s Tale: Hubris, Justice, and the Bard
Curator’s note: This is the second act of Ren’s tragedy trilogy. If you haven’t read Jenny’s Tale yet, start there – this picks up exactly where that story ended. Act One showed us the crime. Act Two shows us the reckoning.
Screech Tale Shakespeare Analysis: Where Tragedy Accelerates
“Our story, it starts right at the end of the life of poor Jenny / Clocked out like Big Ben.”
This Screech tale Shakespeare analysis picks up where Jenny’s Tale left off – with a body on cold concrete and a fourteen-year-old killer spiralling into his own destruction. That opening line does two things at once: it connects us back to Jenny’s death while reminding us that her murder is just the beginning of a longer unravelling. Big Ben chiming the hour – time running out, a life marked and measured and finished. Screech has just killed someone, and now we follow him into the aftermath.
Like Jenny’s Tale, this is filmed in one continuous take in a Brighton alleyway at night. But where Jenny’s performance was intimate and focused, Screech’s Tale is kinetic, desperate. Ren plays every character – Screech at the door, the girlfriend on the phone, Officer Richard with the gun – shifting between perspectives in real time. When Screech is shot, the camera literally falls to the ground. No cuts. No safety net. Just the story playing out with terrible momentum.
The First Betrayal: Patrick Won’t Open the Door
“Patrick, man, let me in, please open the door / I think I fucked up, Patrick, really fucked up, man, I’m not sure / I got crazy, left a lady laying still on the floor / I think I killed her, Patrick, come on, man, I can’t knock no more.”
Listen to the progression there. Screech starts uncertain – “I’m not sure” – like he can’t quite believe what he’s done. He’s dissociated from it, the way people do when trauma response takes over. “I got crazy” – not “I went crazy,” but “I got crazy,” like something external happened to him. And then the awful clarity: “I think I killed her.”
He’s at Patrick’s door because Patrick is his person. According to Ren’s Instagram posts about the backstory, Patrick and Screech were crime partners – they’d done jobs together, had each other’s backs on the streets. When a fourteen-year-old kid who’s just committed murder shows up at your door, that bond is supposed to mean something.
But there’s no answer. “Screech kept on knocking, ’til his knuckles became sore / But there’s no sign of Patrick down at number 54.”
Number 54. Specific, concrete, real. Screech knows exactly where Patrick lives because he’s been there a hundred times before. And Patrick’s inside – he has to be, because the girlfriend is there too. The annotations on Genius confirm what the song implies: Patrick and Screech’s girlfriend are together. She’s cheating on him with his best mate.
So when Screech needs refuge most, Patrick stays silent. Lets him stand out there knocking until his knuckles bleed. That’s the first nail in the coffin.
The Second Betrayal: The Girlfriend on the Phone
Next, Screech tries calling his girlfriend. Watch the performance video – Ren acts this out with the phone, his voice shifting from desperate to tender to explosive:
“Hey, babe, you in? / Nah, nothing really, nah, I’m just a bit tired / Listen, can I swing around yours for a few minutes? / I just really miss you, babe.”
He’s trying so hard to sound normal. Downplaying the urgency. “Just a bit tired” – what a heartbreaking understatement for a kid who’s just killed someone and is spiralling. He doesn’t tell her what happened. He just needs to be near someone who cares about him.
And she says she’s busy.
“What the fuck you mean you’re busy? / You fucking bitch, for fucks’ sake.”
There it is. The switch flips. Desperation becomes rage becomes the only emotional language he knows how to speak. Of course she’s busy – she’s at Patrick’s. The two people Screech trusts most are together, and neither of them will help him.
I spent thirty years working with young people in acute mental health settings, and this pattern is textbook attachment trauma. When you’ve grown up with neglect, betrayal, inconsistent care – when the people who were supposed to protect you didn’t – you learn to weaponise your pain. The girlfriend’s rejection isn’t just a “no.” It’s confirmation of what Screech already believes about himself: he’s alone, he’s worthless, and people will always let him down.
So he defaults to aggression. It’s the only power he has left.
No Refuge, No Escape
“No refuge for our villain, for the bitter hands of fate / Have something far more sinister in mind, that does await.”
Notice Ren calls him “our villain” – not “our hero,” not even “our protagonist.” The framing is deliberate. Screech has done something unforgivable. But Ren doesn’t let us off the hook by making him a simple monster. He’s a villain created by circumstance, shaped by neglect, failed by every system and person who should have caught him before he fell this far.
The “bitter hands of fate” – that’s the Greek tragedy element coming through. In classical drama, once the machinery starts turning, it doesn’t stop. Hubris triggers nemesis triggers catastrophe. But here’s where I’d push back slightly on the “hubris” in the subtitle: I’m not sure what Screech displays is hubris in the classical sense.
Hubris is excessive pride, the belief you’re above the gods or the rules. But Screech’s defiance feels more like despair dressed as bravado. He’s not running from the police because he’s got nothing left to run towards. Patrick won’t open the door. His girlfriend rejected him. He’s killed someone. At fourteen, with no support network and no hope, what’s left?
Suicide by Cop: The Clinical Reality
“Sirens sound approaching like a Banshee in the night / The shrill cry of justice cutting like the sharpest knife / But Screech was never one to run, not one to miss a fight / One hand upon his blade, he turned to face the blue light.”
The banshee reference is perfect – in Irish mythology, the banshee’s wail signals imminent death. Screech hears the sirens and knows what’s coming. And he doesn’t run. He turns towards them.
“Come on then, you fucking cunts, let’s fucking have you then / I am Screech, I’m the boss here, I’m the ender of man / You think that uniform you’re wearing means that you own these streets / Well, these are my fucking streets and they call me fucking Screech.”
On the surface, this reads as pure aggression – a kid high on adrenaline and street mythology, asserting dominance one last time. But clinically, this looks a lot like suicide by cop. It’s a recognised phenomenon: when someone deliberately provokes law enforcement into using lethal force because they can’t or won’t end their own life directly.
Screech charges at armed officers with a knife. He doesn’t try to negotiate, doesn’t try to escape. He claims the streets as “his” not because he believes it, but because he needs to feel like he has agency in the final moments. “I’m the ender of man” – except he’s about to be ended himself, and somewhere in his traumatised fourteen-year-old brain, he knows it.
The tragic irony is that he gets what he asks for.
Officer Richard: The Third Casualty
“Richard was an officer, who stood at six-foot-three / Working London on the night shift, what he didn’t think he’d see / Was a boy running at him, like an animal possessed / With no time to hesitate, he fired four bullets at Screech’s chest.”
Here’s where Ren’s genius really shows: he doesn’t let us forget Officer Richard. Six-foot-three, professional, trained, just doing his job on a night shift in London. And suddenly there’s a kid – because that’s what Screech is, a kid – charging at him with a knife, possessed, giving him no choice.
“No time to hesitate.” Four bullets. And a fourteen-year-old boy drops dead.
Richard isn’t a villain. He’s not corrupt or cruel. He’s a man who had to make a split-second decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life. I’ve worked with police officers and paramedics in mental health crisis settings, and the occupational trauma is real and devastating. Richard followed protocol. He protected himself and others. And he still has to live with killing a child.
That’s the third casualty of this tragedy. Jenny’s dead. Screech is dead. And Richard’s life is irrevocably changed by what he had to do.
The Performance: Playing All the Parts
If you watch the video, you’ll see Ren embody every character in real time. He’s Screech pounding on the door, desperate and manic. He’s the girlfriend on the phone, voice shifting to play both sides of the conversation. He becomes Officer Richard, holding an invisible gun, and then he’s Screech again, strumming the gunshots on his guitar – bang bang bang bang – and the camera falls to the ground as Screech falls.
It’s one continuous shot. No cuts. No editing. Just like the violence it depicts – it happens in real time, and you can’t look away.
This is the same method as Jenny’s Tale, inspired by the film Victoria: the performance vulnerability mirrors the content. When Ren plays Officer Richard firing the gun, when he plays Screech dying, there’s no distance between performer and story. It’s raw, immediate, and it demands we witness the whole thing without the comfort of cinematic tricks.
The Ending: “It’s Such a Shame”
“Our story it ends, right at the start / Young Screech and poor Jenny, lying one street apart / An officer shaken by the boy that he claimed / Two body’s lay lifeless, and it’s such a shame / It’s such a shame.”
The parallel structure to Jenny’s Tale is deliberate. Both stories end with that refrain – “it’s such a shame” – but now the weight has doubled. Two bodies. One street apart. They died within minutes of each other, in the same neighbourhood, probably within sight of each other if you walked far enough.
And an officer “shaken by the boy that he claimed.” Not killed. Not shot. Claimed. Like Richard has taken ownership of Screech’s death, whether he wanted to or not. It’s his now. He has to carry it.
The repetition of “it’s such a shame” feels almost inadequate, doesn’t it? Like those words can’t possibly hold the magnitude of what’s just happened. And that’s the point. There’s nothing adequate to say. No moral lesson that makes it better. Just waste, and loss, and two young lives ended before they had a chance to become anything else.
Why This Screech Tale Shakespeare Analysis Matters
Greek tragedy has a formula: the hero has a fatal flaw (hamartia), commits an error in judgement, and falls from grace. The audience watches with a mix of pity and terror, knowing the outcome is inevitable once the wheels start turning.
Screech’s Tale follows that architecture, but with a modern, street-level twist. His hamartia isn’t pride or ambition – it’s trauma, neglect, and a complete absence of support systems. His error in judgement was charging at armed police with a knife. And his fall is literal: four bullets, camera to the ground, life over at fourteen.
But Ren complicates the formula by refusing to let us pin this on individual moral failure. Screech made terrible choices. He killed Jenny. He charged at police. But he’s also a kid shaped by poverty, failed by adults, betrayed by the only people he had left. The tragedy isn’t just that he fell – it’s that he was set up to fall from the moment he was born.
That’s what makes this feel Shakespearean. Not the language (though Ren’s wordplay is sharp), but the structural inevitability. You watch Screech spiral and you think, “There has to be another way out.” But there isn’t. Patrick won’t open the door. The girlfriend won’t take his call. The sirens are getting closer. And a fourteen-year-old boy with a knife doesn’t stand a chance against armed officers.
It’s such a shame.
Previous: Jenny’s Tale – Shakespeare in the Streets
Next: Violet’s Tale – The Revelation