Stage version that cramps Room’s style
Story robbed of its ‘essential oppressive tedium’
It took me a long time to get round to reading Emma Donoghue’s novel Room. The idea of fictionalising barbarities such as the 24-year imprisonment of Josef Fritzl’s daughter sounded uncomfortably like voyeuristic exploitation.
But Donoghue overcame that problem to a great extent by her extraordinary skill in telling the story of the sexual captive, known as Ma, through the voice of her five-year-old son Jack, fathered by the abductor/rapist.
The stage version preserves the child’s voice by having a grownup Jack (Fela Lufadeju) take the narrative and imaginative side of the story, while a child actor takes the dramatic role. Some of the claustrophobic effect is lost by having three people in the room but the situation – involving helplessness and the regular rape of the mother by Old Nick – is still deeply disturbing.
The early video when we see the captives, through a skylight view, like rats scuttling in a cage, is an excellent image, but attempts to visualise little Jack’s childish vision of the world outside with graphics are just a distraction. The need to condense everything into a theatrical package also robs the story of much of its essential oppressive tedium.
The second half sees Ma and Jack trying to cope with freedom after seven years of captivity. Ma faces people who are unable to enter her tortured mind, while Jack misses the known world of the room compared with the visual excesses of freedom.
Songs are used to express Ma’s agony and frustration but are overused in the second half. There’s also a terrible Ma/Jack duet trying and failing to spell out everything. Which is not to detract from the exceptional performances of Witney White as Ma, and, on opening night, of Taye Kassim Junaid-Evans as Jack. And the set design and use of lighting is highly imaginative.