Yesterday the National Theatre’s Shed won this year’s Empty Space Peter Brook Award. Since opening in April, this temporary venue on the South Bank has certainly carved out a strong identity, with a season of inventive and intimate productions.
Nut is a 70-minute piece that throbs with feeling. The work of Debbie Tucker Green, it opens with reclusive Elayne and brash Aimee arguing about how they’d like their funerals to be conducted.
Elayne, played with carefully measured ferocity by Nadine Marshall, soon emerges as the central figure — a troubled woman whose isolation is symbolised by her not bothering to replace the dead batteries in her doorbell.
Around her other voices pulse, hinting at unspoken and unspeakable ordeals. Elayne’s sister bickers with her ex-husband. A boy (Tobi Adetunji on press night) sings hauntingly. He is ignored — and may even be dead.
Anthony Welsh’s smooth, articulate Devon dishes out instructions — yet finds time to celebrate the bygone pleasures of Woolworths, sounding a bit like an X Factor judge as he reflects that “Their pick’n’mix was on point”.
There’s plenty of banter, flecked with humour and poetry.
But the sharing of cigarettes seems to forge deeper bonds than words can. It also serves as a reminder of death. Menace floats in the air yet wafts away amid the characters’ exaggerated, almost competitive puffs of smoke.
For all the streetwise sharpness of the writing, it is hard to get a handle on what’s happening.
Lisa Marie Hall’s design is an intriguing but mysterious structure, in which mugs hang from giant jangling coathangers.
It’s typical of a piece that is simultaneously vivid and opaque — a tough nut to crack.
Until December 5, theshed.nationaltheatre.org.uk
