Alistair McDowall’s madly ambitious new play may be the boldest metaphor for climate catastrophe since Don’t Look Up. Or an indictment of the way women have been treated through the ages. Or a supernatural horror story, a myth, or all of the above. It’s a beguiling, baffling, sometimes absurd 120-minute ride for the mind, directed like a pacy genre thriller by Vicky Featherstone, with a transfixing central performance from Ria Zmitrowicz. It’s totally bonkers and I kind of loved it.
We first see Zmitrowicz’s character as a nameless, voiceless waif acquired by a female Victorian spiritualist to act as a passive “conduit” to the nether world. Oops. Turns out she’s actually a life force in female form, who doesn’t eat or sleep, can’t be killed, and can sometimes accurately, sometimes randomly, transport herself and others through time. The action shifts from 300,000 BC to 1348 AD to WWII to a retired nurse’s modest house in the 1990s. This leads to some deliberate and some accidental era-clash comedy. Don’t consider this a spoiler: I’ve barely scratched the surface.
The writing is on a constant knife edge between drollery and ridiculousness, profundity and bathos. I’m thinking of adopting the line drily delivered by Rakie Ayola as the medium – “I must retire to calibrate myself” – to get out of any or all social situations in future. But when a footpad tells a medieval knight of peasants “nailed by their tongues to their burning houses” it gets the wrong sort of laugh. A large chunk of the action takes place in the medieval era, which Monty Python long ago ruined for anything but farce.
The horror, though, is subtly overwhelming. Imagine being burned and dismembered as a witch or demon then waking up to face the same again; endlessly forgetting, then remembering. Imagine the existential dread your immortality inspires in the mortal. There’s a hint the character is an embodiment of the earth itself, endlessly abused in human form but predating and outliving humanity.
Zmitrowicz, with her bruised reticence and sudden rages, plays all this with remarkable conviction, aided by serio-comic turns by Ayola and Fisayo Akinade in multiple roles: Akinade is particularly fine as a laid-back 1970s historian. The fourth actor, Tadhg Murphy, gets stuck playing the deadpan knight, poor chap.
Merle Hensel’s looming set is “a brutalist cathedral of history”, according to my notes. Lighting designer Jessica Hung Han Yun provides states or incandescent lava, electric blaze, and the shimmering spectrum of a collapsing planet for Zmitrowicz’s final speech.
This show will divide critics, friends, couples. It frequently overreaches itself but also highlights how safe most mainstream theatre remains. Even the most poetic, challenging dramas, from Hamlet to Hamilton, ultimately boil down to some people arguing in a room. Or, in the case of Godot, beside a tree. McDowall set out to write a myth that tracks human history, then to transcend it. Naturally he falls short. But to watch him try is exhilarating. Go. Get your mind blown and your hackles raised.
Royal Court, to Sat 5 March; buy tickets here
